Pampers and 
Verses 



By 



Harriet Gaylord Smith 



PAPERS AND VERSES 



PAPERS AND VERSES 



HARRIET GAYLORD SMITH 



» 



CHICAGO, MDCCCC 



9i5 n * 



W1NFRED OVERHOLSE& 
DEC. 13, 1951 



CO 



Few people pass out of this world more regretted, 
and leaving sweeter memories, than Harriet Gay lord 
Smith, who died April 8th, i8q6. 

Aside from the affection she held as a kind and 
noble woman, she was admired for her wit and intel- 
lectual ability, and not a few men and women of 
Chicago have remembrance of her witty sayings, and 
of her poems, stories and other papers read on vari- 
ous occasions. 

Since her death many persons have expressed a 
wish that there was some collection of her writings, 
and especially that some of those appearing in this 
book might be preserved. In view of these sugges- 
tions, it has been thought proper to publish this small 
volume. 

It is not expected that this publication will be a 
source of profit, but it seemed eminently fit, that it 
should be sold for the benefit of a charity whose wel- 
fare Mrs. Smith, during her life, held close at heart. 
With the thought that some good may thus come of it, 
the book is offered for sale to her friends and to the 
public. 

Chicago, iqoo. 



TO. 

DEAR MRS. ROCKWELL 

ON HER EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY, 
APRIL 9TH, 1883 

1st Timothy 5th, g, 10 

Here's health and long life to "The Bible-class Belle," 
The beautiful woman we all love so well, 
In whose gracious presence this union is seen, 
The wisdom of eighty, and wit of eighteen. 

Hear Timothy tell what a widow should be, 

And judge who could suit him more nearly than she; 

She is over threescore, and her good works are 

praised ; 
She has taken in strangers, three children she's raised. 

She has washed the saints' socks, if she hasn't their 

feet; 
She has cheered the afflicted with sympathy sweet; 
Good works she has followed with all of her might ; 
And e'en in the number of husbands she's right. 

These eighty bright buds, with their floating perfume, 
Which fills, like the odor of ointment, the room, 
Of the sum of her years form an emblem most true, 
With joy for their sunshine, and teardrops for dew. 



All sunshine would wither, all shadow would blight, 
But mingling them wisely, the Father of Light, 
Through pleasure and sunshine, through sorrow and 

showers, 
Brings on to perfection our souls and his flowers. 

And what though we wither and fade as a leaf, 
And the time of our-blooming, at longest, is brief ? 
Again in the springtime sweet roses shall bloom, 
And beauty immortal shall ris&from the tomb. 

From her loving friend, 

Harriet Gaylord Smith 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

My Lost Friend - - - - 9 

Society's Crime a Threnody - - 10 

The New Bonnet - - -_ - 14 

The Modern Pied Piper - - - 17 

In Heaven I have Her Still - - - 18 

The Shepherd 20 

Children in Fiction- - - - 22 

The American Short Story 64 

A Missionary's Difficulties - - - 120 



MY LOST FRIEND 

O closest friend, once ever at my side, 

I miss thee more than words avail to tell! 
To thee my dearest dreams I'd confide, 
Sure thou would'st guard them secretly 
and well. 
Now when I stretch toward thee my seeking 
hand, 
I wildly clutch the unresponsive air; 
. Groping I feel for thee, and speechless stand, 
Slowly discerning that thou art not there. 

" All flesh is grass," the royal psalmist saith; 

Thou art cut off, friend of my former days. 
The fashion of this world, it perisheth, 

And I am bewildered by new-fangled ways; 
But still I am cherishing a faith sublime, 

Unmoved by all that has conspired to 
shock it; 
Great changes bring the whirligig of time, 

And those of fashion may return my pocket! 
9 



SOCIETY'S CRIME 
A THRENODY 

In the good old days when life was new, 
And words were simpler, and hearts more true, 
There lived an old lady of primitive ways 
Whom rich and poor delighted to praise. 
Dame Hospitality, this was her name, 
And her door stood open to all who came; 
For she counted it joy with each to share 
Her pleasant home and her simple fare; 
And the people gathered from far and from 

near 
For a smile of welcome, a word of cheer ; 
And, came they in coaches or rickety wagons, 
They had comfort of apples and stayings of 

flagons. 
But years passed on, and there came to town 
A frisky dame in a gorgeous gown; 
And she found seven others as silly as she, 
And they called each other Society. 



SOCIETY'S CRIME A THRENODY 

Their heads were empty, their heels were 

light, 
So they danced and capered from morning 

till night; 
And somewhere or other, on every day 
They sat down to eat, and they rose up to 

play. 
They thought themselves happy, but now 

and then * 
They caught a word from the mouths of men, 
A word of honest and hearty praise 
Of the good old dame and her simple ways; 
And it filled them full of as fierce a hate 
As Haman felt for the Jew at the gate; 
And each one lifted her jeweled hand 
And swore she would banish her out of the 

land. 
So they sought next morning her open door, 
And they flung her down on the polished 

floor; 
And with ribbons of yellow of pink and of 

white, 
They snared her and noosed her and pinioned 

her tight. 



SOCIETY'S CRIME A THRENODY 

She did not strive and she did not cry, 

But the pleading glance of her gentle eye 

Was so full of reproach for their envious spite 

That they hastened to bury it out of their 
sight 

With roses of every various hue — 

Pink, crimson, and yellow, and possibly blue; 

They stifled her first with their sweet-smell- 
ing savors, # 

And stopped her last gasp with what they 
called "favors." 

So there she lay dead; but of all things 
human 

The crudest thing is a heartless woman; 

And to make her sad ending as sure as 
could be, 

They drowned her in gallons of "Afternoon 
Tea." 

They had had their way, and carried their 
point, 

And their times no longer were out of joint; 

So each seized each by her murderous hand, 

And they danced round the grave to a man- 
dolin band. 



SOCIETY'S CRIME A THRENODY 

And this is the terrible way that it came 
That the dear old lady is now but a name; 
And we mourn the loss of her simple ways, 
And sometimes sigh for the good old days. 



13 



THE NEW 
BONNET 

A foolish little maiden bought a foolish 

little bonnet, 
With a ribbon and a feather and a bit of lace 

upon it; 
And that the other maidens of the little town 

might know it, 
She thought she'd go to meeting the next 

Sunday, just to show it. 

But though the little bonnet was scarce 

larger than a dime, 
The getting of it settled proved to be a work 

of time; 
So when 'twas fairly tied, all the bells had 

stopped their ringing, 
And when she came to meeting, sure enough, 

the folks were singing. 



H 



THE NEW BONNET 

So this foolish little maiden stood and waited 

at the door, 
And she shook her ruffles out behind and 

smoothed them down before ; 
"Hallelujah! Hallelujah !" sang the choir 

above her head, 
"Hardly knew you! Hardly knew you!" 

were the words she thought they said. 

This made the little maiden feel so very, 

very cross 
That she gave her little mouth a twist, her 

little head a toss; 
For she thought the very hymn they sang 

was all about her bonnet, 
With the ribbon and the feather and the bit 

of lace upon it. 

And she would not wait to listen to the 
sermon or the prayer, 

But pattered down the silent street, and hur- 
ried down the stair, 



*5 



THE NEW BONNET 

Till she reached her little bureau, and in 

a bandbox on it 
Had hidden safe from critic's eye her foolish 

little bonnet. 

Which proves, my little maidens, that each 

of you will find 
In every Sabbath service but an echo to your 

mind; 
And the silly little head that's filled with 

silly little airs 
Will never get a blessing from sermons or 

from prayers. 



16 



THE MODERN 
PIED PIPER 

I may be out of fashion, but it sometimes 

seems to me 
That the very best procession my longing 

eyes could see 
Would be headed by the piper of famous 

Hamelin town, 
Who through our city streets should go, 

a-piping up and down, 
Till he turned from out the multitude of 

laughing girls and boys 
All the silly little Greenaways and priggish 

Fauntleroys, 
With bonnets all too big for them, and 

trousers much too tight, 
With sashes and with flowing curls — and led 

them out of sight, 
And left with us such sensible and sturdy 

girls and boys 
As lived before the Greenaways and priggish 

Fauntleroys. 

*7 



IN HEAVEN 

I HAVE HER STILL 

Oh, mothers! who to-night in quiet cham- 
bers 
Watch eyelids close and prattling tongues 
grow still, 
Then, bending fondly, cover sleeping infants, 
Thank God you have those living children 
still. 

When last the spring came laughing o'er 
the meadows, 

Waking the flowers, making glad the rill, 
I rocked my cradle in the twilight shadows, 

And thanked my God I had my baby still. 

Now when the twilight shadows dimly gather, 
Vacant that cradle stands, its rocking still; 

And I, beside it, pray my Heavenly Father 
To give me strength to bear His holy will. 
18 



IN HEAVEN I HAVE HER STILL 

Yet often 'mid those hours of bitter weeping, 
'Mid swelling bursts of anguish, loud and 
wild, 

God pities me, and sends me tender comforts 
More tender than I ever gave my child. 

And though I cannot wholly cease my 
weeping, 
Though mother-longings still my heart 
must fill, 
I yield my baby to her angel's keeping, 
And thank my God in Heaven I have her 

still. 
Cleveland, May 17th. 



19 



THE SHEPHERD 

I watched a shepherd following his sheep, 
And saw him, through the shadeless sum- 
mer day, 
With rod and staff their wand'ring footsteps 
keep, 
And guide them in the safe and pleasant 
way. 

This through the day, but when the night 
had come, 

And evening dews upon the grass lay cold, 
I saw them meekly follow, one by one, 

To the warm shelter of the waiting fold. 

All save one stubborn sheep, which still 

would stray, 

And heedless linger in the meadows cold, 

Till by his rod the shepherd showed the way, 

And with sharp smiting drove her to the 

fold. 



THE SHEPHERD 

And in that straying one myself I saw; 

Saw how to gentleness I would not yield, 
Till from Thy rod I learned to love Thy law, 

And by Thy stripes my wanderings were 
healed. 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

Is it not true that we dwellers in cities 
have really a fuller enjoyment of flowers 
than the country folk? 

We need not, like them, wait longingly 
for the set time of their natural blooming, 
but can at any moment, by the touch of 
a bell and a word in a cylinder, summon the 
roses of summer to bloom even by our win- 
ter fires. 

But one rural pleasure is in a great meas- 
ure denied to us, the picking of our own 
flowers, the choosing of each blossom which 
goes to the making of every nosegay. 

Separated by years of time, with hundreds 
of conventional bouquets, on whose beauty 
rested the shadow of the florist's bill, there 
rise before me two visions of flower-gather- 
ing, one a memory from my childhood, and 
the other a rare joy of my later years. 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

On the first my treasure trove was a tiny- 
bunch of short-stemmed, faint-scented wild 
flowers, and on the other I grasped a bou- 
quet of such size that for the first time in 
my life my hand seemed too small. 

Never shall I forget those roses of Santa 
Barbara, those fuchsias, jasmines, and pas- 
sion-flowers, those snowy daisies, and, 
strange in their novelty, and beautiful by 
theircorurast, others of a brilliant Sevres blue. 

Do you wonder by what subtle spell of 
association the thought of "children in 
fiction" has brought these dim visions 
before me? 

Simply this, that in my search for them 
through the early ages of literature, I find 
their faces peeping as shyly from the back- 
ground of their elders as did the wild flowers 
of my childhood from spreading leaves and 
mossy tree-trunks, while only the varied 
color and abundant bloom of that later bou- 
quet can adequately represent the group of 
children which crowd the field of modern 
fiction. 

23 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

A friend who knows my fondness for be- 
ginning at the very beginning of things said 
to me, apropos of my subject, "By the way, 
who is the first child mentioned in fiction?" 
It sounded like a conundrum, but as I knew 
it was not meant for one, I thought for 
a moment, and then named that lonely child 
whom Hector called Scamandrus, but all 
else Astyanax. 

His tender beauty clings like a. bright 
wall-flower to those Trojan battlements, and 
though "a babe too young to speak," he 
seems worthy to head the procession of 
children which through ages the wand of 
genius has summoned into life. 

In the far past all our glimpses of these 
children show them in attitudes of depend- 
ence and subordination, and all precepts ad- 
dressed to them inculcate only the duties of 
reverence and submission. 

A seal seems to have been set on their 
lips, so silently do they move about among 
their elders, and even the blessing of our 
Lord was long in bringing them into the 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

wide plane which His love would claim for 
them. 

All through the days of medieval Chris- 
tianity they were evidently regarded as ob- 
jects of pity, and seldom appear in any 
other relation to their elders than as the 
victims of their cruelty. 

Harrowing details of the offending of the 
little ones form the staple of these chron- 
icles, and the vengeance which pursues the 
evil men by whom these offenses come points 
the moral of the dismal tales. 

The story of Hug of Lincoln as related 
by the Prioress of the Canterbury pilgrimage 
gives a striking instance of this sort. 

The piety of the little Jewish boy who, as 
he came to and fro, full merrily would sing 
and chant "Alma Redemptoris" so infuriated 
his kinsmen that they cut his throat and 
cast him into a pit. Even there he sat up- 
right, and ' :t Alma Redemptoris gan to synge 
so lowde that all the place bigan to rynge." 

Revealed by this miracle, his body was 
taken up, and carried with a great procession 

25 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

to the next Abbaye, while his mother swoon- 
ng by the bier lay. 

In two other of Chaucer's stories, those 
of " Constance" and " Patient Griselda," the 
sharing of the sorrow of the mother by the 
child adds sharpness to the sword which 
pierces her own soul. A recent writer sees 
in this close union of mother and child in 
suffering a transfer of the Madonna into 
English literature, but is it not rather only 
another presentation of the eternal motherly 
as shown in the story of Ceres and Proser- 
pine and many other classic myths? 

The rare mention of children in Shakes- 
peare is attributed by Rosetti to the circum- 
stances of his life. He says: "His marriage 
as a mere lad, and a certain unnatural ma- 
turity, must have early separated him from 
companionship with children. His son 
died young, and his busy life in London 
must have prevented his knowledge of 
domestic interiors. 

But if personal intercourse was necessary 
to his conception of his characters, from 
26 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

what world does he draw his pictures of 
kings and queens, of witches and fairies? 

Is not the lack of children in his plays 
due rather to the limitation of stage repre- 
sentation in those happy days before the 
introduction of what has been irreverently 
called '/The Kid Drama"? 

The most striking picture of boyhood pre- 
sented by him, that of Arthur in "King 
John," is too familiar for quotation, but that 
of Marcius in "Coriolanus" is perhaps less 
remembered. 

Valeria says of him: "On my word, the 
father's son; I'll swear 'tis a very pretty boy. 
O' my troth, I saw him run after a gilded 
butterfly; and when he caught it, he let it 
go again; and after it again; and over and 
over he comes, and up again; catched it 
again: or whether his fall enraged him, or 
how 'twas, he did so set his teeth and tear 
it; O, I warrant, how he mammocked it!" 

Are not these indeed winged words, so 
highly do they express the quick darts of 
the insect and the eager pursuit of the boy? 
27 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

John Bunyan, though the prince of dream- 
ers, writes himself down as a family man in 
his realistic description of the illness of 
Matthew in the second part of his " Pilgrim's 
Progress": 

"Now Matthew, the eldest son of Chris- 
tiana, fell sick, and his sickness was sore upon 
him, for he was much pained in his bowels, 
so that he was pulled as it were both ends 
together." 

Christiana speedily summoned an ancient 
and well-approved physician, one Mr. Skill, 
who concluded that he was sick of the gripes, 
and said, "This boy has been tampering 
with something that lies in his maw undi- 
gested." (A little peach of emerald hue, 
perhaps.) So he made him a purge of the 
blood of a goat and the ashes of a heifer, 
but it was too weak. 

So he made one to the purpose of the 
blood of Christ, with a promise or two, which 
he was to take fasting "in a half a quarter 
of a pint of the tears of repentance." So, 
after a short prayer for the blessing of God 
28 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

upon it, he took it, and "it put him into 
a fine heat, and a healthy sweat, and it quite 
rid him of his gripes." 

It is noticeable that in England, a coun- 
try where family life has apparently reached 
its highest development, and the literature 
of which abounds in the domestic novel, 
children are but tardily brought to the front. 

Perhaps this may be accounted for by the 
fact that the interest of these English 
stories was for a long time so largely pre- 
nuptial. 

Little brothers or sisters seldom help or 
hinder the progress of their elders toward 
matrimony, and it is only in the modern 
analytical novel that the deeper experiences 
which follow marriage are largely dealt with. 

Even in such a typical domestic novel as 
"The Vicar of Wakefield" the children sel- 
dom have a speaking part, and are rather 
treated objectively as arousing the pride 
and affection of the parents. 

If the creation of "Goody Two Shoes" 
be rightly attributed to Goldsmith, however, 
29 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

he has furnished us with one study of child- 
hood which bids fair to be immortal. 

The early novelists, Fielding, Smollett, 
and Richardson, make slight and almost 
slighting mention of children, and it is only 
as the child is father of the man that he 
seems to be held worthy of their considera- 
tion. 

It is strange that Sir Walter Scott's love 
for his "Pet Marjorie" did not inspire him 
to reproduce her quaint personality in some 
of his novels, but he finds as little room for 
childish figures as any of his predecessors. 
A search for them in his long gallery of 
portraits shows us only the weird face of 
Mary Averul and the impish form of Flibber- 
tigibbet, both too uncanny to seem like pic- 
tures of flesh-and-blood children. 

But the thoughts of men are widened by 
the process of the suns, and there comes an 
epoch in every literature in which what has 
long been unobserved in society is suddenly 
brought to light. 

Among the grown-ups of Miss Austen 
30 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

scarcely a child shows its face, and it is with 
surprise that we come upon the little Gard- 
ners (left like bundles ''to be called for") 
on the return of their parents from the con- 
voy of Emma on her eventful visit to Bath. 

The element of poverty and helplessness 
was at last recognized as something to be 
noted and reckoned with, and with this new 
conception of the claims of those unable to 
plead for themselves came in a recognition 
of the rights of children. 

The child, so long ignored, is at last 
brought forward as a distinct element in 
literature, and England takes an early part 
in its introduction. 

Wordsworth in his " Lyrical Ballads" and 
Mrs. Browning in her "Cry of the Children" 
raise the first notes of an appeal for the 
recognition of their rights, which was soon 
taken up by the warm heart and clear voice 
of Charles Dickens. 

The wail which Mrs. Browning sends forth 
as voices rising from the depths of mines 
and the din of factories, he carries on till 
31 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

we hear it sounding from the school, the 
workhouse, the thieves' den, and, more sor- 
rowfully still, from the dreary home where 
a stern father lets his little child go so piti- 
lessly and so pitifully down to his death. 

The impression produced by these por- 
trayals of the woes of childhood can scarcely 
be realized by those who live in these hap- 
pier days, when so many of the currents of 
benevolence are set in the direction of their 
relief. 

Its results were immediate and marked, 
and in view of them we can forgive much 
that seems exaggerated and bizarre in the 
portraits of children presented by Dickens. 

Those of them who play comic roles seem 
to smirk and grimace, and those who suffer 
do it in a somewhat melodramatic fashion; 
but in spite of this air of self-consciousness, 
they are all types, and easily recognizable 
types, of certain classes of children. 

Little Nell has her counterpart in the de- 
voted daughter of many a humble household, 
and the abounding philanthropies of this age 
32 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

give many public-spirited mothers a pretext 
for shifting their domestic burdens onto the 
shoulders of daughters of Caddy Jellaby's 
self-sacrificing type. 

We come upon the morbid and hydro- 
cephalus Paul Dombey in the children's 
ward of our hospitals, and even the Kenwigs, 
with their pig-tails and pantalettes, their 
music-masters and their dancing lessons, 
may serve as melancholy examples of the 
passion for fancy and showy accomplish- 
ments which pervades all classes of our 
modern society. 

The few children which appear in the 
novels of Bulwer and Thackeray are much 
less impressive than those of Dickens. 

Little Sophie, the child who figures in 
"What Will He Do with It?" is but Little 
Nell fantastically bedecked with stage prop- 
erties. 

The interest which is felt in the early 

years of Henry Esmond's life soon fades 

before the stirring experiences which follow, 

and the childhood of Denis Duval, the story 

33 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

of whose life was interrupted by the death 
of its chronicler, Thackeray, displays no 
marked peculiarities. 

Do you see that I have led you steadily 
on from among the shy and scanty flowers 
of those woodland depths till we stand at last, 
as I did, in that garden of California, bewil- 
dered by the wealth of bloom which awaits 
our choice? 

And while that warning clock reminds me 
of the little while in which I can gather 
a few of them for you, how can I choose 
among so many? 

Perhaps my best guide in this selection 
will be an attempt to indicate some of the 
various ways in which children find their 
place in books intended for older readers. 

One of the most frequent and natural of 
these is the attempt to show the gradual 
development of their childish natures by 
education and circumstance into characters 
which influence their ultimate destiny. 

Within the scope of such a book we see 
enacted the miracle of the Indian juggler, 
34 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

who shows in rapid succession the unfolding 
of a plant from its seed, through its bud 
and bloom, to fruitage. 

Two striking instances of this class of 
book are George Eliot's "Mill on the 
Floss," and George Meredith's "Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel." 

In the first of these we come early on this 
characterization of the personnel of the two 
children Tom and Maggie Tulliver. 

He was one of those lads that grow every- 
where in England, and at twelve or thirteen 
years look as much alike as goslings, as dif- 
ferent as possible from Maggie, with her 
skin like a mulatto, her dark, heavy hair, 
and the incessant tossing of her head to keep 
it out of her gleaming eyes, giving her much 
the air of a Shetland pony. 

In these children we have a striking 
instance of the two forms of heredity pos- 
sible to fictitious characters, for as markedly 
as Tom is the child of the Tullivers, is his 
sister the reproduction of the nature and 
habits of the youthful Marion Evans. 
35 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

The same questioning of the problems of 
life, the same defiance of restraints and 
conventionalities, the same devotion to duty 
characterize both; and was not the outcome 
of their lives more nearly similar than 
would at first appear? 

Who can doubt that to one of George 
Eliot's nature the wave of social ostracism 
with which she buffeted for so long was 
harder to bear than poor Maggie's short and 
sharp conflict with surging Floss? 

In the " Ordeal of Richard Feverel" we 
have the story of the boy starved on a diet 
of maxims, and cramped by the theories of 
a pedantic and tyrannical father, who essays 
to play the part of Providence in the control 
of the life of his only son. 

The boy is so manly and so generous, so 
brave in his avowal of his share in the crime 
of arson for which a humble companion is 
in danger of transportation, that it is hard 
to follow him to the bitter end which his 
father so cruelly makes inevitable. 

By the way, have not the reputations of 
36 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

the old men of England been made to suffer 
unduly at the hands of recent writers, who 
have painted their general unpleasantness 
as a background which should bring into 
relief the shining virtues of their sons and 
grandsons? 

Will not some one give us a story in 
which the oppression of a vicious and tyran- 
nical grandchild is endured with such 
patience by a heavenly minded grandfather 
that the young imp at last repents and 
" hatches itself a cherubim"? 

Again, we find children in a secondary 
position, but materially influencing the 
destinies of those with whom they are con- 
nected by relationship or affection. 

In Mrs. Gaskell's "Ruth" and Haw- 
thorne's "Scarlet Letter" we have support 
for my own theory that no love has such 
compelling force as that of a mother for 
her child, working as it does in one case, the 
making, and in the other the making perma- 
nent the bonds of a less holy passion. 

A child's bitterest foes are so often those 
37 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

of his own household, that the enlighten- 
ment of parents is a frequent object for the 
introduction of children into books intended 
for adult readers. 

Onto how many childish shoulders has 
been bound the burden of a false estimate 
of God which has kept their faces bowed to 
the earth and their young eyes from being 
lifted to the loving countenance of their 
Father in Heaven! 

Is it strange that tortured by such a belief 
the boy Waldo, on that sun-parched African 
farm, should cry out in despairing defiance: 
"I hate God! I love Jesus Christ, but I hate 
God!" 

But later on, like the shadow of a great 
rock to screen the tortured boy from the 
flashing of a justice as pitiless as that blind- 
ing African sun, appears a blessed vision of 
a figure coming over the dark green grass. 
"And it came closer and closer to him, and 
then the voice said, 'Come!' and he knew 
surely who it was. He ran to the dear 
feet and touched them with his hands — yes, 
38 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

he held them fast! When he looked up, the 
face was over him, the glorious eyes were 
loving him, and they two were close 
together." 

On Castle Blair and its happy, breezy 
group of children this later formed sunshine 
always beams. 

Hear Nessa's confession of faith — "Yes," 
said she, softly, "if God were to hate us, 
even when we are wicked, what should we 
do?" 

"It often comes over me with a sort of 
rush of gladness how that when we make 
mistakes, and get tired, and go wrong, He 
is still there, watching over us and loving us 
all the time, never getting impatient. 

"And you know," she added, a little 
shyly, "we are told to be as like God as we 
can." 

What wonder that Ruskin set the seal of 
his cautious appreciation on this book in 
these words: "The book is good and lovely 
and true, having the best description of 
a noble child in it (Winnie) that I ever read; 
39 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

and nearly the best description of the next 
best thing — a noble dog." 

A frequent form of cruelty to children is 
the ruthless destruction of their illusions. 
Of this Hawthorne draws a striking picture 
in his "Snow Image." 

The girlish form modeled from snow by 
his children and endowed with life by their 
fancy is brought by a well-meaning but 
prosaic father to the glow of the fire, which 
melts it into nothingness. 

Is there not here a lesson for those who 
steal too soon from their children their 
happy faith in Santa Claus, their own 
proper saint, the jingling of whose bells is 
sweeter to them than the chimes of any 
cathedral? 

The one utterly unendurable sorrow has 
always seemed to me to be that of a mother 
who sees her child go down to death for 
lack of the arresting influence of nourish- 
ment, medicine, and favoring climate. 

No picture of these hard conditions as 
imposed by pioneer life has ever moved me 
4 o 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

as does this one from "Zury," that fanciful 
story of Western emigration. 

It was this way: "The little girl, who 
might have lived in a warm, rich, and com- 
fortable home, could not bear the cruelty of 
her environment, and died after long and 
quiet suffering. 

"How slow Death was in finishing his 
work that night! Long after the beloved 
eyes had turned up out of sight, the poor 
little chest kept on heaving, gasp succeding 
gasp, the heart-broken mother praying that 
each might be the last. 

"At last the end came, and Selina 
straightened the wasted limbs, put on the 
poor girl's best clothing, tied up the sharp 
chin, and closed the eyes with something — 
they had no coins to lay on the lids. 

"They had no funeral; there was not even 
a burial till spring had thawed the ground 
so that a grave could be dug. They fixed 
two crotched sticks against the side of the 
house, and rested the little coflfin on them. 

"Through the winter following Selina 
41 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

could not get around the house through the 
drifts, but she learned the spot where they 
had placed the supports, and she could go 
and rest her face against the corresponding 
place inside." 

Have we not here a Stabat Mater of as 
sharp an agony as that which Mary bore 
when she stood the cross beside? 

"Only women understand children thor- 
oughly," says Rudyard Kipling; "but if 
a mere man keeps himself quiet and refrains 
from talking down to his superiors, the chil- 
dren will sometimes be good to him and let 
him know what they think about the 
world." 

Surely our own Howells must have fulfilled 
these conditions, for to me there is no 
sweeter child in fiction than little Efiie 
Bowen in his "Indian Summer." There is 
something so charming in her mixture of 
naivete and unconsciousness, she combines 
so sweetly the graces of society with what 
is best in the simple nature of a child. 

But let her speak for herself in an expres- 
42 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

sion of one of those vague fancies for some 
one much older than herself which so often 
evidence the first timid flutterings of a girl- 
ish heart: 

"I think Mr. Colville is about the pleas- 
antest gentleman that comes here — don't 
you, mamma? He's so interesting, and says 
such nice things. I don't know whether 
children ought to think of such things, but 
I wish I was going to marry some one like 
Mr. Colville — of course, I should want to 
be tolerably old. How old do you think 
a person ought to be to marry him?" 

"You mustn't talk of such things, Effie," 
said her mother. "No, I suppose it isn't 
very nice," replied the child. 

What a pity that Mamma Bashkirtseff 
had not administered some such wholesome 
snubbing to the precocious Maria, or is it 
safer in these fancies, as in measles, to have 
them come well out? 

Howells' master, Tolstoi, in the stolen 
interview between Anna Karenina and her 
Serozsha, proves himself to have been ten- 
43 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

derly observant of the winning ways of the 
little Tolstois. He writes: "At the right 
of the door was a bed, and on the bed 
a child was sitting in his little open night- 
gown, his little body was leaning forward, 
and he was just finishing a yawn and stretch- 
ing himself. His lips were closing into 
a sleepy smile, and he fell back upon his 
pillow, still smiling. 'Serozsha!' she whis- 
pered in the child's ear. He raised himself 
on his elbow, turned his frowzy head around, 
and opening wide his eyes, half closed in 
sleep, threw himself into his mother's arms. 
'Mamma!' he whispered; and smiling sleep- 
ily, climbed into her lap, and with that warm 
breath peculiar to children, pressed his face 
to her neck and shoulders." 

Oh, Anna, how could you let the length 
of his father's ears or the beguiling tongue 
of Vrousky separate you from such a child! 

Oh, Tolstoi, how could the hand that drew 
a cherub like this lend itself to the painting 
of such a satyr as the hero of the "Kreutzer 
Sonata"! 

44 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

The lack of humor in children seems to 
confirm the theory that the individual pre- 
sents an epitome of the development of the 
race. 

A capacity for displaying and enjoying 
humor is certainly not found in savage 
tribes, and children seldom possess any 
natural facility in this direction. 

Fun may be made of them, and^r them, 
not often by them, and few of the juvenile 
characters in fiction are otherwise than acci- 
dentally and unconsciously humorous. 

Two of the boys drawn by Mark Twain 
form an exception in this respect, and seem 
to have inherited the waggishness which dis- 
tinguishes our great American humorist. 

Andrew Lang says of them: "I, for one, 
feel that I have at least two friends across 
the sea, Master Thomas Sawyer and his 
friend Huckleberry Finn. 

Though Mrs. Ewing is reported by her 
sister as enjoying, even in her last illness, 
the pranks of Huckleberry Finn, it is diffi- 
cult to understand how they could be as 
45 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

nearly to her taste as the more natural 
ebullitions of Tom Sawyer. 

Tom had been sentenced by his Aunt 
Polly to whitewash her fence by way of 
punishment, and took up his brush and went 
tranquilly to work. 

' 'Ben Rogers hove in sight presently, the 
very boy of all boys whose ridicule he most 
dreaded, and said: 'Hello, old chap! you 
got to work, hey?' 

"Tom whirled suddenly, and said: 'Why, 
it's you, Ben; I warn't noticing.' 

" 'Say, I'm going in a-swimming, I am. 
Don't you wish you could? But I suppose 
you'd rather work, wouldn't you? Course 
you would.' Tom contemplated the boy 
a bit, and said: 'What do you call work?' 

" 'Why, ain't that work?' Tom resumed 
his whitewashing, and answered, carelessly: 
'Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. All 
I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer.' 

" 'Oh, come now, you don't mean to let 
on that you like it?' The brush continued 
to move. 

4 6 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

" 'Like it? Well, I don't see why 
I oughtn't to like it? Does a boy get 
a chance to whitewash a fence every day?' 

"That put the thing in a new light. Ben 
stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his 
brush daintily back and forth, stepped back 
to note the effect, Ben watching every move, 
and getting more and more interested. 

"Presently he said: 'Say, Tom, let me 
whitewash a little.' Tom considered, was 
about to consent, but he altered his mind. 

" No, no; I reckon it would not hardly 
do, Ben. You see Aunt Polly's awful par- 
ticular about this fence — right here on the 
street, you know; but if 'twas the back 
fence, I wouldn't mind, and she wouldn't. 
Yes, she's awful particular about this fence; 
it's got to be done very careful. I reckon 
there ain't one boy in a thousand — maybe 
two thousand — that can do it the way it's 
got to be done.' 

" 'No! is that so? Oh, come now, lemme 
just try. Only just a little. I'd let you, if 
you was me, Tom.' 

47 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

" 'Ben, I'd like to, honest Injun, but 
Aunt Polly — well, Jim wanted to do it, and 
she wouldn't let him; Sid wanted to do it, 
and she wouldn't let Sid. Now, don't you 
see how I'm fixed? If you was to tackle 
this fence, and anything was to happen to 
it?' 

" 'Oh, shucks! I'll be just as careful! 
Now, lemme try. Say, I'll give you the 
core of my apple.' 

" 'Well, here. No, Ben, don't — I'm 
afeard — ' 

" 'I'll give you all of it.' 

"Tom gave up the brush, with reluctance 
in his face, but alacrity in his heart. 

"Ben worked and worked in the sun, 
while the retired artist sat on a barrel in the 
shade close by and planned the slaughter of 
more innocents. 

"There was no lack of material; boys 
happened along every little while; they 
came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. 

"By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom 
had traded the next chance to Billy Fish 
4 8 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

for a kite in good repair; and when he played 
out, Johnny Miller bought in for a one-eyed 
kitten, and so on, and so on." 

And when the middle of the afternoon 
came, from being a poor, poverty-stricken 
boy in the morning, "Tom was the proud 
possessor of twelve marbles, part of a jews- 
harp, a piece of blue glass to look through, 
a spool cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock 
anything, a piece of chalk, a glass stopper 
of a decanter, a couple of tadpoles, six fire- 
crackers, a brass doorknob, a dog-collar, 
but no dog, the handle of a knife, four pieces 
of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old win- 
dow-sash." 

I have been much impressed in my late 
reading by the fact that throughout the 
course of fiction childish forms have been 
made to serve as lay figures on which is 
fitted every phase of religious belief. 

Thanks to the cheapening of material, the 

children of to-day need no longer be arrayed 

in the made-over garments of their elders, 

but what shall we say of the cruelty which 

49 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

would force upon their young natures the 
swaddling-bands of "a creed outworn"? 

By one of those vagaries of preservation, 
of which so many ludicrous instances were 
furnished by our great fire, the flood of 
years, in sweeping from me so much of 
greater value, has left to me my first story- 
book. 

This it is which I hold in my hand, that 
you may smile with me at this very proto- 
plasm of juvenile literature. 

It is the ''History of Giles Gingerbread," 
and its title stands first in the list of juve- 
nile books published by John Newbery in St. 
Paul's churchyard in the year 1765. 

Its hero is a little boy, who, seeing Sir 
Toby Wilson drive by with his coach and 
four, beseeches his father to teach him how 
he too may attain to one. 

The paternal precepts which follow force 
upon the boy a Jewish gabardine, so accu- 
rate is their presentation of the connection 
between well-doing and worldly prosperity 
which marks the Proverbs of Solomon, and 
50 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

indeed the entire teachings of the Old Tes- 
tament. 

For Ellen Montgomery, the young hero- 
ine of "The Wide, Wide World," is refash- 
ioned the straight gown and poke bonnet 
of a Methodist class-leader. The rereading 
of no book after the lapse of years has 
marked for me so entire a change in my 
moral and mental attitude as that of this 
favorite of my girlhood. 

Can it be that I once held the garments 
of Ellen's mother while she hurled at her 
poor child the reproach of having a mind 
hardened by sin, and a heart irreconciled to 
God? 

And this while the dear little girl was try- 
ing bravely to bear the great sorrow of her 
mother's mortal illness and looking lov- 
ingly and trustingly to her heavenly Father 
for help in her sore need. 

Would not Mrs. Montgomery have been 

wiser to have economized her short breath 

for the utterance of a few plain precepts 

against the falling into confidential relations 

Si 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

with strange young men on steamboats, em- 
phasized .with kisses and embraces? 

And what shall we say of John Hum- 
phreys, the lightning converter, and Ellen's 
prompt acceptance of his plan of salva- 
tion? 

As I lately read of this, I saw as a fitting 
close to the first act of this religious, senti- 
mental drama, the youthful pair capering 
hand in hand down to the footlights, while 
they joined in singing that exultant chorus 
of the Sankey hymn which runs: "We've 
done it, done it, done it, done it! We've 
done it, done it now!" 

An English critic declares that there is 
more kissing in one of Miss Wetherell's 
novels than in all of Sir Walter Scott's put 
together, and adds that "from these pictures 
of life young people have reason to conclude 
that if they are very good and very pious 
and very busy in doing grown-up work, 
when they reach the age of sixteen some 
young gentleman who has been in love with 
them all the time will declare himself, and 
52 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

they may then look to find themselves, all 
the struggles of life over, reposing a weary 
head on his stalwart shoulder for the rest of 
their days." 

While the boys and girls of Miss Yonge's 
Church of England novels are allowed to 
wear the regulation bib and pinafore of the 
English nursery and schoolroom, to the 
breast of each is affixed the red cross of 
ecclesiasticism, and they march as steadily 
after this emblem as did the martyred inno- 
cents of "The Children's Crusade." 

Very gentle and refined, very sweet and 
saintly are these children of hers, in spite of 
their stained-glass attitudes, and we will- 
ingly accept them as exponents of one phase 
of Christianity. 

But must we concede to them the monop- 
oly of correct religious training? Can no 
good come to any childish soul except 
through the Sacraments of the Established 
Church? 

Indeed, the perfect familiarity with which 
these young folks handle the doctrines of 
53 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

the church sometimes makes us feel that 
they must have been trained to chant the 
Thirty-nine Articles as we American children 
used to sing the capitals of our States. 

The doctrine of baptismal regeneration is 
brought into special prominence, and there 
is something amusingly naive in the way in 
which the youthful mother in " Heart's 
Ease" says, while looking at her baby after 
his christening, "I was thinking how very 
good he is!" 

I hope I shall not be considered irrever- 
ent or unmindful of what I was taught to 
believe of covenant blessings bestowed in 
baptism on the children of believing parents 
if I tell just here a little story prepared by 
the "This reminds me" of Abraham Lincoln. 

A young father, speaking of his month- 
old boy, once said to me: "Oh, Mrs. Smith, 
I wish you could see how brave that little 
boy of ours is! Why, when we know that 
he has the most dreadful stomach-ache he 
just puts up his little lip and tries not to 
cry!" 

54 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

But if we find occasion to smile at some 
of the characteristics of Miss Yonge's 
novels, how many of us have shed torrents 
of tears over the beautiful life and early 
death of "Heir of Redcliffe?" It would be 
surely a moderate estimate, allowing the 
small average of two weepers to each 
volume, the eight thousand copies of this 
work already issued must have brought into 
requisition no less than sixteen thousand 
pocket-handkerchiefs for the wiping of 
thirty-two thousand weeping eyes. 

My own criticism upon the form of 
family life presented by Miss Yonge is that 
it affords a model of what Ruskin calls 
a regular and sweet selfishness, and tends 
to confine the dream of love and sympathy 
to the watering of a small garden-plot, 
instead of letting it make glad the great 
city of our God. 

At the risk of overworking the comparison 

between the religious teachings imposed on 

children and the garments bestowed on 

them, I must speak a few words in praise of 

55 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

the garb in which Mrs. Ewing arrays her 
juveniles. 

No attempt is made to force upon them the 
uniform of any sect, they lend their names to 
no fashion of hose and doublet, but stand 
before us in raiment convenient for them. 
Some in the everyday garb of good habits, 
and others in the fair, white linen of an 
entirely attainable degree of childish saintli- 
ness. 

To be converted and become as little 
Leonard, the hero of the story of a " Short 
Life" would seem to many of us altogether 
lovely, and to be desired, but what shall we 
say of a possible conversion into a Little 
Lord Fauntleroy? 

Some of the minor characters of Mrs. 
Ewing's stories are scarcely less interesting 
than those which occur more readily to the 
memory. 

One finds so rarely in children's books 
such plain advice as to small faults as that 
to Selina by her godmother in the story 
called "A Bad Habit." 
56 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

" There are," says the old lady, "two 
things, Selina, against your growing up 
good-looking. One is that you have caught 
so many vulgarisms from the servants, and 
the other your bad habit of grumbling. 

"Underbred and illy educated women are 
as a rule much less good-looking than well- 
bred and highly educated ones. A girl who 
was never taught to brush her teeth, to 
breathe through her nostrils instead of her 
lips, and to chew with the back teeth instead 
of the front has a very small chance of grow- 
ing up with a pretty mouth; and constant 
grumbling makes an ugly underlip, a fore- 
head wrinkled with frowning, and dull eyes 
that see nothing but grievances." 

And here is a wonderful picture of an 
English enfant terrible. 

"When the good couple received their 
friends at home there was no escape from 
Amelia. 

"If it was a dinner party, she came in 
with the dessert, or perhaps sooner. 

"She would take up her position near 
57 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

some one, and either lean heavily against 
his knee or climb into his lap without invi- 
tation. 

"She would break into the most interest- 
ing discussion with her own childish affairs, 
in the following style: 

" 'I've been out to-day — I've walked to 
town — I jumped over three brooks. Can 
you jump? Papa gave me sixpence to-day — 
I'm saving my money to be rich, Mr. Brown. 
Mr. Brown, don't talk to mamma, but peel 
me an orange. Mr. Brown, I'm playing 
with your finger-glass!' 

"And when at last the finger-glass, filled 
with cold water, had been upset on Mr. 
Brown's shirt-front, Amelia's mamma would 
cry out, 'Oh, dear — r, Amelia!' and carry 
her off with the ladies to the drawing- 
room." 

And again, who has not seen children sub- 
jected to that most objectionable of jokes, 
the parody of love affairs in connection with 
them, and does not sympathize with Leo 
when the elderly Miss Benton calls him her 
58 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

little sweetheart, and her brother wags his 
hand of a morning with "How's Miss Eliza's 
little beau?" 

Polly, in a "Flat-Iron for a Farthing," 
makes an utterance which may well give us 
cause for thought. 

"It seems to be just all the heap of peo- 
ple who are only a little religious who 
never get any good out of it. It isn't 
enough to make them happy, whatever hap- 
pens, and it is just enough to make them 
uncomfortable if they play cards on a Sun- 
day." 

The children of Mrs. Ewing's stories are 
object-lessons in the process and effect of 
the domestic training which Dr. Bushnell 
records as that adopted by his own mother. 
Of this he writes: "Her stress was laid on 
industry, order, fidelity, neatness, truth, and 
prayer, and the rule of the house; in these 
was to be the hope, in a great measure, of 
religion. She," he continues, "conde- 
scended to stay for the most part in matters 
of habit in her humanly allotted field, but 
59 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

keeping constantly an upward look that 
what she should so prepare in righteous 
habit should be a house builded for occu- 
pancy of the Spirit. 'First the blade, then 
the ear, afterward the full corn in the 
ear.' " 

Surely this is the evolution which we are 
to expect from the application of natural law 
in the spiritual world. 

But as Kipling has it, the babies "trot at 
the tail of every procession," and the one 
which I have marshaled to-day, as headed 
by the infant Astyanax, must be closed by 
the uncertain steps of a few chosen from 
recent literature. 

That babies are all alike is the dictum of 
only those who have never studied their 
points; and who but the grumpiest old 
bachelor could mix up such distinctive 
specimens as we can all recall? 

Three of them, Ginx's, Booties', and Mrs. 

Bibs', have given their names to as many 

volumes, and where shall we find a more 

pronounced identity than in that babe of 

60 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

Mrs. Poyser's who knew its own mind with 
such remarkable clearness? 

The gipsy baby in Mrs. Ewing's "Lob" — 
lie by the fire — begins his conflict with 
conventionalities by a hand-to-hand struggle 
with his cap; and who does not remember 
Tommy Luck, of "Roaring Camp," as he 
rassels with the finger of his friend of Ken- 
tuck? 

See him lying on a blanket in the gulch 
while the miners are working in the ditches 
below: 

He was always tractable and quiet, and it 
is recorded that having once crept beyond 
his corral — a hedge of tasseled pine-boughs 
which surmounted his bed — he dropped over 
the bank on his head in the soft earth, and 
remained with his mottled legs in the air in 
that position for at least five minutes with 
unflinching gravity. 

"I crep' up the bank just now," said Ken- 
tuck one day, in a breathless state of excite- 
ment, "and dern my skin if he wasn't talking 
to a jay-bird as was a-sittin' on his lap. 
61 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

There they was, just as free and sociable as 
anything you please, a-jawin' at each other 
like two cherry-bums." 

Although St. Paul's attitude toward women 
would scarcely suggest him as a patron saint 
of the Fortnightly, I may here remind you 
of the outburst at the close of his chronicle 
of the heroes of faith. "And what shall 
I more say? For time would fail me to 
tell of Gideon and of Bariah, and of Sam- 
son, and of Jephthah, of David also, and 
Samuel, and of the prophets?" 

So I lament that after the marshaling of 
more than fifty children, time fails me to tell 
of Rosamund and her purple jar, of Tom 
Brown and Robert Falconer, of little Eva and 
her shadow Topsy, and the long line which 
might stretch on to the crack of doom. 

But let just one more childish voice be 
heard; for though it is not the custom of 
the Fortnightly to close with a benediction, 
all hearts must respond to the spacious and 
all-embracing invocation of Tiny Tim, "God 
bless us every one." 

62 



THE AMERICAN 
SHORT STORY 

The short stories which we are just now 
all reading, with more or less interest and 
attention, resemble the persons whom we 
casually meet, chat with for a moment, and 
go on our way. 

Some of them, having entertained us for 
the nonce, are forgotten, while others leave 
an impression which brings them often to 
our vivid and pleasurable recollection. 

The secret of this abiding interest is not 
always easy to formulate. 

In the case of persons it seems usually to 
spring from some charm of face or manner 
or from an impression of unfathomed depths 
of sympathy or character, while the claim 
of a story on our attention is generally pro- 
longed by the mode of its telling, a baffling 
63 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

mystery in plot, or some startling surprise 
in its denouement. 

As pronounced examples of these distinct 
forms of interest let me cite "An Autumn 
Holiday," by Sarah Jewett, as excelling in 
literary style; "The Other Woman" of 
Richard Harding Davis in the enchanting 
power of mystery, and Aldrich's "Marjorie 
Daw" in the stroke of its final surprise. 

The slight sketch of Sarah Jewett is 
almost destitute of plot, and is little more 
than a transcript of a mood of nature and 
the mind of its writer, yet how persistently 
recurring is its picture. 

How often has the dying spark of dinner- 
table talk been quickened by the mention of 
"The Other Woman," and to how many of 
us has the simple sentence, "There isn't 
any Marjorie Daw!" come with something 
of the shock and chill of a shower-bath! 

So nearly universal is the acquaintance 

with the characters of this form of fiction 

that one may be oblivious of Daniel Deronda, 

forgetful of John Ward, and even careless 

6 4 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

of Robert Elsmere, while not to know Gal- 
lagher and Van Bibber is indeed crass igno- 
rance. 

As has been well said, "A short story is 
neither an expanded anecdote nor an arrested 
novel," differing as it does from the one in 
its capacity for extension in detail, and from 
the other in the comparative simplicity of 
its plot. 

The motif of the novel being generally 
complex, and thus capable of more variety 
in conditioning and characterization, oppor- 
tunity is given for those details and explana- 
tions which, like the chorus of a Greek 
tragedy, serve at the same time to inform 
the audience and to carry on the action. 

The story, on the contrary, being usually 
founded on a phase or episode, allows of few 
digressions and requires a swift directness 
of movement toward the goal of its conclu- 
sion. 

So little opportunity is given for the 
gradual development of character that we 
are required to accept that of its personages 
65 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

as fully formed and as evidenced by their 
conduct in a special situation or crisis. 

Such features of their environment as are 
required must be sparingly and incidentally 
presented, and even the enlivenment of con- 
versation is necessarily restricted. 

A tendency to supply its lack by collo- 
quialisms and dialect is so markedly on the 
increase as, according to James Russell 
Lowell, to "suggest garlic," and much of 
our recent reading bears an impression of 
one having made an effort to acquire volapuk 
or planned an excursion to the Tower of 
Babel. 

And yet in spite of these limitations, or it 
may be in consequence of them, the writers 
of short stories have at their command all 
the conditions of the most perfect art. 

Their work is performed under a single 
impulse, is subject to no subdivision of inter- 
est, and moves toward a natural and definite 
conclusion. 

One of the characters in Henry Fuller's 
"Chatelaine of La Trinite" thus justifies his 
66 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

declared intention never to write anything 
that could not be gotten through during an 
afternoon in a garden or a single evening 
over the fire. 

"He remarked that this was one respect 
in which the coming fiction might well 
imitate a picture or a symphony. Now, 
one's appreciation of a picture was practi- 
cally instantaneous, one might follow the 
whole course of a symphony in twenty or 
thirty minutes. But to become familiar 
with a book required two or three days or 
a month, as the art of the writer or the inter- 
est of the reader determined. The idea of 
form suffered, the sense of proportion was 
dulled, the congruity and cohesiveness of 
the idea was impaired." 

Or, in simple language (because my own), 
the companion of a stroll needs only to suit 
himself to the mood of a single hour, while 
that of a walking tour must be capable of 
responding to the changing humors of many 
successive days. 

With due respect to the balance of ad- 
67 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

vantage, most prominent writers of fiction 
have chosen to exhibit their skill in the em- 
ployment of both forms, many of them using 
the short story as a trial flight before attempt- 
ing the wider sweep of a novel. 

An equal excellence in them is rare, the 
short stories of Bret Harte, Sarah Jewett, 
and Rudyard Kipling being distinctly supe- 
rior to their longer works, while the minor 
productions of Dickens, Thackeray, and 
Hawthorne are wellnigh forgotten in the 
sustained interest of their novels. 

Henry James alone occurs to me as a writer 
whose skill in the use of both forms is so 
pronounced that it is difficult to decide in 
which he has achieved his greatest success. 

But as the tiny star of the snowdrop is as 
perfect a flower as the creamy disc of the 
Victoria Regia, so a distinct excellence in 
the use of the minor form justifies a claim 
to be a genuine artist and entitles to mem- 
bership in a literary guild of rapidly increas- 
ing numbers and reputation. 

The student of literature will not be slow 
68 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

to discover that the intellectual expression 
of each period seems to be in a great meas- 
ure determined by its material conditions. 

Thus the splendid and spectacular age of 
Queen Elizabeth developed the drama, 
the religious struggle of the commonwealth 
suggested the stately form of the epic, the 
elegant leisure of the reign of Queen Anne 
led to the elaboration of the essay, and the 
duller court of George III. demanded the 
prolonged enlivenment of the three-volumed 
novel. 

What wonder that the rush and hurry of 
our later American life should create a de- 
mand for an intellectual food as capable of 
being snatched and bolted as a railway 
sandwich! Or, as has been aptly said, 
" Since he who reads must run, therefore 
write so that he who runs may read." 

If our forbears found in the novels of Sir 
Walter Scott something as staying and 
satisfying as were the simple joints of their 
daily diet, may not we characterize these 
piquant and unsatisfying productions as 
69 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

intellectual entrees, and deprecate their re- 
sult in the creation of a mental dyspepsia 
which must ultimately destroy the relish for 
less stimulating food? 

As entertainment is the primary object, 
the craving for amusement, which is so 
marked a feature of our modern life, has 
been a powerful factor in the creation of 
a demand which has received the usual 
response of a proportionate supply. 

Numerous syndicates exist which, by the 
purchase of them in manuscript, act as mid- 
dlemen between their authors and publishers. 
They form the entire contents of several 
magazines, and a recent notice in the Lon- 
don AthencBum of a volume written by Mar- 
jorie, aged nine, and dedicated to "papa and 
mamma," proves that even child labor is 
enlisted in this production. 

Mrs. Stowe writes to George Eliot, "So 
many stories go tramping through our 
minds in the magazines nowadays that they 
are, so to speak, macadamized," and we may 
esteem it fortunate for our national literary 
70 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

taste and reputation that the standard of 
their acceptableness as maintained by our 
American editors is exceptionally high. 

So confessedly are they the distinctive 
form of the literary activity of our day and 
our country that it may seem strange to some 
of you to know that a few of us can recall 
a time when we were compelled to depend 
for them, as well as for many other luxuries, 
on foreign importation. 

In those days a row of cloth-bound, 
somber-hued volumes coldly furnished forth 
the colorless tales in which the Lady of the 
Manor essayed to impress certain points of 
creed and doctrine, while the genius of Mrs. 
Opie took a more practical turn in an effort 
to show in a series of short tales the various 
forms in which, like our modern malaria, the 
ancient sin of lying is wont to take shape. 

So didactic is the tone of these old-time 
stories, so plainly do we smell the mold of 
instruction above the rose of entertainment, 
that they seem to form direct links in the 
chain of evolution from the fables and 
7i 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

moralities of an earlier date, and as little 
likely to be the chosen companions of an 
idle hour as such mortuary leaflets as "The 
Young Cottager" or "The Dairyman's 
Daughter." 

Like that of these well-known tales, their 
atmosphere and nomenclature is foreign and 
unfamiliar, for it is not until the present cen- 
tury is well advanced toward its second 
decade that we come upon any distinctively 
American short stories. 

At this time there began to gleam from 
the polished surface of the claw-footed tables 
of our grandmothers those red-and-gold 
volumes which, under the name of Annuals, 
served as the earliest repository for them. 

"I have found out a gift for my fair!" 
cried the lover of the period, as he hastened 
to lay at the feet of his Dulcinea one of the 
amaranths, forget-me-nots, or garlands of 
friendship which suddenly brightened the 
literary field — short-lived flowers, blossom- 
ing bravely in the sunshine of a fleeting 
favor, to die through the long years since, 
72 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

faded and neglected, in the dimness of those 
New England book-cupboards. 

In the year 1840 there came from Phila- 
delphia, then an acknowledged literary cen- 
ter, a noticeable impulse to this form of 
composition in the offer of two of its lead- 
ing periodicals, Godey's Lady's Book, and 
Graham's Magazine, of twelve dollars a page 
for contributions in prose or verse. 

This, for that day, munificent recompense 
set in motion the pens of our ready writers, 
with a result by no means calculated to 
increase our respect for the literary taste 
and attainments of the period. 

Listen to this sprightly conversation ex- 
tracted from a Lady's Book story of fifty 
years ago: " 'Careless, light-hearted child- 
hood!" murmured Miss Sedley; 'oh, that for 
one little hour I could recall the happiness 
of that blessed period!' 

" 'Ah, dear Frances!' replied Miss Pres- 
ton, 'through all our lives a bountiful 
Providence scatters the materials of happi- 
ness; is it not our own fault if we fail to 
73 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

combine them to produce it?' " And so 
these giddy young women have it back and 
forth for page after page of similar and 
much overpaid platitudes. 

Amid the general dullness of these early 
magazine stories those of Eliza Leslie show 
occasional glimpses of a brightness in 
dialogue and in orginality of plot which 
place them distinctly in advance of the writ- 
ings of her contemporaries. 

Miss Leslie, also the author of a "Be- 
havior Book" and "Manual of Cookery," in 
pursuance of their tendencies, gives us in her 
tales a glimpse of the formality and epi- 
cureanism which distinguish her native city 
of Philadelphia, and does not hesitate to 
express in them her strongest local preju- 
dices. 

In one, the heroine, Mrs. Woodbridge, 
is a New York belle, who, on attaining to 
the proud privilege of marriage to a model 
of a young man of Philadelphia, sacrifices 
the credit of his dinner-parties and the com- 
fort of his home to her inborn love for ex- 
74 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

travagant toilettes. And in another, to the 
superficial education acquired at a New York 
boarding-school is attributed the ignorance 
of Eliza Farnham, whose first letter to her 
fiance, a young gentleman of Boston, being 
modeled on those borrowed from her grand- 
mother's and Belinda, the cook, results in 
the breaking of her engagement. 

An accidental sight of a later letter writ- 
ten by Eliza after a year of study in the 
literary atmosphere of Philadelphia brings 
the lover back to his allegiance, and a gor- 
geous wedding follows. 

Over the marriage-feast we discern the 
trail of the cook-book, in the mention, as its 
crowning ornament, of a watermelon pre- 
served whole by the grandmother of the 
bride, that estimable old lady whose culinary 
skill seems to have so far exceeded her epis- 
tolary talent. 

The most popular magazine writer of this 

period was Nathaniel Parker Willis, the son 

of a Boston deacon, who, supplementing his 

New England education by foreign travel, 

75 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

acquired a certain juantiness of style which 
gives interest to his stories of life at Nahant, 
Saratoga, and Ballston Spa, the fashion- 
able watering-places of the time. 

Nearly contemporaneous with these, but 
sharply contrasted in style, are the grew- 
some tales of Edgar Poe, which anticipated 
the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne and the 
detective stories of Wilkie Collins and Anna 
Katherine Green. The moral purpose, 
which was entirely lacking in them, appears 
very distinctly in the anonymous collection 
somewhat later under the name of the 
"Saxe Holms Stories," while the " Diamond 
Laws" of Fitz-James O'Brien and Harriet 
Prescott Spofford's "In a Cellar" imitate 
their analytic and highly imaginative style. 

During the years in which our national 
literature was reaching this stage of its de- 
velopment, from the bitter root of sectional 
prejudice the red flower of battle was pre- 
paring to burst into bloom, and the breaking 
out of our Civil War absorbed for a time the 
public interest to the exclusion of anything 
76 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

less stirring than war songs or military dis- 
patches. 

In the darkest hour of this struggle 
Edward Everett Hale, by his powerful story 
of "The Man without a Country," gave such 
an impulse to the latent patriotism of his 
countrymen as many of us have felt at the 
sudden sight of its stars and stripes bravely 
floating among the alien colors of a foreign 
port. 

Doubtless some of you can recall the 
sensation produced by this clever story of 
Philip Nolan's rash denunciation of his 
country and its bitter punishment, and how 
its verisimilitude caused many persons to 
accept it as a record of facts. Mr. Hale's 
crowning excellence as a story-teller is 
a management of details and allusions which 
gives an air of truth to his most improbable 
narrations, and helps us to believe that 
Frederic Ingham may really have been 
undone by his "double," or, as is claimed in 
his "Skeleton in the Closet," the ruin of the 
best laid schemes of the generals of the 
77 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

Confederacy was brought about by the cast- 
off hoopskirts of its women. 

The axiom that a period of national con- 
flict is always followed by one of literary 
activity holds good in our own time and 
land, for the writers of short stories who 
appeared as single spies before our Civil 
War began after its close to muster in 
battalions. So that from this date I must 
treat them topographically rather than 
chronologically, and you must no longer sit 
as the spectators of a panoramic succession, 
but change your point of view for that of 
those before whom the exhibitor of a cyclo- 
rama points out the separate localities of 
a simultaneous action and interest. 

Such a survey is facilitated for us by the 
recent habit of literary preemption by right 
of which each writer asserts a special claim 
to the section originally selected as the 
scene of his incidents. 

This intense localization lends itself to the 
methods of the realists, and brings into 
prominence the distinctive element of recog- 
78 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

nition which with them has superseded that 
of surprise as employed by the Romanticists. 
The pleasure which we find in this seems to 
be akin to the feeling which makes us view 
with more interest a photograph of a well- 
known scene than one which portrays an 
unvisited scene. 

The arguments for and against these sec- 
tional divisions are those which apply to the 
work of specialists in every direction, the 
chief evidence in their favor being the notice- 
able falling off in the work of those who 
forsake their original locality for fresh fields 
and pastures new. A marked instance of 
this may be recognized in Bert Harte's failure 
to deal successfully with any life but that 
of the mining camps of California, and a later 
one is presented in Marie Wilkins's excur- 
sions into No Man's Land in the track of 
Tourguenieff. 

Its best result for us is the addition to our 

literature of a graphic record of the minutest 

peculiarities of each section of our broad 

land. This record goes far to confute Pro- 

79 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

fessor Bryce's somewhat shallow criticism of 
the monotony of our American life, for no 
attentive reader of short stories can fail to 
recognize a wide variety of character and 
incident under a superficial uniformity. 

Witness, for example, the chronicles of 
New England as furnished by those who 
have taken up their claims in that land of 
steady habits and strong prejudices, that 
paradise of small incomes and purgatory of 
restless spirits. 

That women form the majority of these 
doubtless arises from the fact that they 
recognize most readily the possibilities of 
the existence of romance under prosaic con- 
ditions, and have a sure sympathy with 
the tragedies which have their origin in the 
struggles of a sensitive conscience, or the 
crushing out of natural instincts and affec- 
tions. 

Perhaps the chief production of New 
England might be designated as spinsters, 
and to few men has it been given to recog- 
nize its varied types, or to discern on their 
80 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

smoothly disposed locks as visible an aure- 
ole as ever crowned a Romish St. Agnes. 

Sarah Jewett and Marie Wilkins have 
been especially tender and reverent in their 
treatment of these unwedded ones, and 
chief among them in subtle charm stands 
the heroine of Miss Jewett's tale of a ''Lost 
Lover." 

Miss Horatia Dam has for long years 
been hallowed by the tender sympathy of 
her friends in the supposed loss at sea of the 
lover of her youth. The ruthless breaking 
of his enshrined image by the appearance at 
her door of a worthless tramp in whom she 
alone recognizes the gallant sailor of her 
early romance is almost heart-breaking in 
its pathos. 

In the simple words of the story: "No- 
body noticed much change in Miss Horatia, 
but Melissa saw that the whale's tooth had 
disappeared from its place on her mantel, 
and her old friend said she began to show 
her age a good deal, and wasn't the woman 
she had been a year ago." 
81 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

Miss Wilkins's Ann Millet finds a less 
disappointing object of love in her cat 
Willy, of whom she says: "I've got my 
Bible and Willy, and a good many folks has 
to be alone as far as other folks is consairned 
on this airth. And perhaps some other 
woman ain't lonesome because I am, and 
maybe she'd be one of the kind that didn't 
like cats, and so wouldn't have got along as 
well as me." 

But alas! we all know how swiftly these 
perfunctorily raised Ebenezers are laid low 
by the first blast of real trouble, and can be 
patient with poor Ann, when, at the tem- 
porary loss of her wandering Willy, she 
bursts out in this wise: 

"1 haven't never had anything like other 
women, but I did want as much as a cat! 
I've never thought I'd ought to begrudge 
other women their homes and their folks; 
I thought perhaps I could get along without 
'em better than some, and the Lord knowed 
it, and seeing there wasn't enough of 'em to 
go round, He gave 'em to them as needed 
82 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

'em most. But there was cats enough! 
I might have had as much as a cat!" 

Within the sisterhood of spinsters we all 
recognize two distinct varieties — those who, 
remaining unwed from necessity rather than 
from - inclination, make of their celibacy 
a crown of thorns for themselves and 
a scourge of small cords for their neigh- 
bors, and those happier ones who, like the 
New England nun of Miss Wilkins, being 
formed by nature for a single life, accept it 
as a vocation and find in it the calm seclu- 
sion of a cloister. 

But the experiences of these unwedded 
ones do not always run in the groove of 
sentiment, as witness that of the Dulham 
ladies, whom Sarah Jewett portrays as buying 
those preposterous frizzes from a beguiling 
French hairdresser, and Miss Wilkins's sport 
of Candace Whitcomb's indignant rejection 
of the gift of a red velvet photograph 
album intended as a solace in her dismissal 
from the village choir. 

"I dun no," she says, "but it would be 
83 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

a good plan to send everybody, as soon as 
they git a little old and young folks begin 
to push in, to a desert island, and give 'em 
each a photograph album. Then they could 
sit and look at pictures for the rest of their 
days. Mebbe government would take it 
up." Surely this is speech seasoned with 
pepper, instead of the apostolically com- 
mended salt! 

It is scarcely possible to cite these stories 
of Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins without an 
attempt to strike the balance of their charm 
and power.. To me the literary style of each 
seems to present the characteristics of the 
personages whom she portrays most success- 
fully. 

Sarah Jewett, being a member of the Brah- 
min class of New England, has the natural 
sympathy of an aristocrat for the extremes 
of society, and depicts with equal skill the 
life of the dwellers in those great white 
houses which Holmes likens to "bowlders 
of civilization left by the retreating tide of 
commerce" and that of the sailors who 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

loiter about the wharves of those decaying 
seaports. 

Her diction is as simple as their manners, 
as free from pretense and artificiality as their 
lives, and we rise from the reading of her 
stories with a feeling of having rested for an 
hour in one of those dim and sacred parlors, 
or floated lazily in the dory of some sun- 
browned fisherman. 

Miss Wilkins's style is by contrast brusque 
and incisive as that of the company to which 
she introduces us, this being chiefly made 
up of village-folk of more sharply defined 
and much less lovable personality than the 
characters of Miss Jewett. 

While both exhibit marked humor, a wide 
difference exists in its quality, that of Miss 
Jewett, as shown in such stories as "News 
from Petersham" and "The Courting of Sis- 
ter Wisely" being far more delicate than the 
broad comicality of Miss Wilkins's "A Mis- 
taken Charity," with those two old women 
flying like scared hens over the bounds of 
the old ladies' home. 

85 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

It is noticeable that in scarcely any of 
Miss Wilkins's stories do we come upon any 
mention of "help" in domestic service, and 
this lack may account for the rasped nerves 
and fretful utterances of those drudging and 
overworked women. 

Of one of these Rose Terry Cooke touch- 
ingly says: "She had already the line of 
care which marks so many New England 
women, across the forehead, like the mark 
of Cain, the signal of a life in which work 
has murdered health and joy and freedom." 

The lonely and isolated lives of many of 
these women, whose social opportunities 
Kate Sanborn declares to be limited to a few 
months' stay in an insane asylum, tends to 
develop what has been well called "a crazy 
conscience," and this element of tragedy 
appears repeatedly in the stories of Miss 
Wilkins. 

It is a lamentable truth that the migration 

of the Puritan fathers with intent to escape 

from the tyranny of the Old World resulted 

in the ultimate establishment of as pro- 

86 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

nounced a despotism in their New England 
homes; for, if we may accept their pictures 
as presented by Miss Wilkins, the domestic 
tyrant is one of their most marked features. 

She has collected for us every imaginable 
species of this most objectionable genus, 
among which the stubbornly vindictive hus- 
band in the story of "Gentian," the no less 
tyrannical wife of "The Kitchen Colonel," 
the thrifty farmer who forced "The Revolt 
of Mother," and the cruel daughter of "The 
Village Lea" are easily recurring examples. 
I know a young girl to whom these pictures 
are so painful that she finds no pleasure in 
the skill with which they are painted, and 
turns from them with the horror with which 
we view the revolting subjects chosen by 
some of the modern French figure paint- 
ers. 

In a recently published volume, called 
"Pratt Portraits Sketched in a New England 
Suburb," we find another and less depress- 
ing variety of life. 

We all know the kind of homes in which 
87 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

this immense Pratt family enjoys a limited 
but entirely satisfied prosperity, houses with 
frequent and aggressive bow-windows, an 
occasional aspiration in the form of a cu- 
pola, and front yards whose proudest adorn- 
ment is a swinging dinner-pot filled with a 
jarring color combination of scarlet gerani- 
ums and crimson petunias. 

Anna Fuller's portraits of their occupants 
suggest those which we should expect to 
find hanging on these walls, stiff copies of 
prosaic men and women, from which all 
charm of personality has been omitted, leav- 
ing a possibly lifelike but by no means 
living picture. 

In one of them, however, we recognize a 
quality which compels our admiration — 
that of "The Yankee Quixote." 

Its hero, a conservative Unionist, feeling, 
in the agitated days just before our Civil 
War, that the village prayer-meeting is serv- 
ing as a place for the expression of partisan 
feeling, startles his townsmen by making 
there this temperate and impartial petition: 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

" Almighty God, we pray Thee to deliver 
the North from the calamities which we 
dread, and we pray Thee to deliver our sis- 
ter, the South, from the vengeance which we 
threaten. Change the hearts of the North 
and the South, and lead us in the way of 
equity and peace." 

When, at the news of the firing on Fort 
Sumter, he was among the first to enlist, 
his brother Pratts, who had suspected him 
of a sympathy with secession, received this 
simple explanation of his unexpected 
patriotism: 

"I suppose you can imagine the case of 
mother's getting into a dispute with a neigh- 
bor, and your admitting that he was as 
much in the right as she; but if he was to 
lift his hand against her, I reckon you 
wouldn't think twice before you knocked 
him down." 

The vignette of a full-rigged ship and 

a meeting-house which adorns the cover of 

the New England Magazine would serve as 

well for a volume of the stories of Eliza- 

89 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

beth Phelps Ward, for she depicts with equal 
skill the New England specialties of sailors 
and ministers. 

Her long residence in the theological 
center of Andover has familiarized her with 
clerical peculiarities, and the fighting parson 
of her "Fourteen to One," the stately presi- 
dent of St. Basil's, and the Reverend Eliakim 
are so distinct in personality that each is 
readily recognized as a study from life. 

Her pictures of the life of the fishermen 
of New England are full of the wild motion 
of the sea, and in her touching story of 
"The Madonna of the Tubs" we feel the 
equal burden of the men who work and the 
women who weep. 

From fishermen we come by direct apos- 
tolic succession to theology, and that of 
New England has found an industrious ex- 
ponent in Anna Trumbull Slosson. 

I hesitate in speaking of her stories from 

a consciousness of what Anatole France calls 

"the impossibility of objective criticism," 

and a fear lest the impression which they 

90 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

make upon me individually may warp my 
estimate of their literary merit. 

Their personages have, in my judgment, 
a fantastic quality which makes them seem 
like mummers rather than actors, and I can- 
not regard their experiences as having much 
closer connection with actual life than those 
of Christian in his allegorical journey. Like 
John Bunyan, Mrs. Slosson seems to have 
had in mind certain points of religious doc- 
trine and experience, and to have so evi- 
dently framed her stories to suit the purpose 
of their explication that in only two of them 
have I been able to discover much genuine 
human interest. 

"Fishin' Jimmy" is, of course, one of 
these, but "Aunt Randy" is less known, and 
in spite of its entire unlikelihood, furnishes 
a striking allegory of the resurrection. 

Aunt Randy, after the death of her only 
child, Jacob, strives to solace herself by the 
dumb companionship of a caterpillar which 
she calls by his name, and when this, after the 
instinct of its kind, digs a grave and hides 
91 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

itself in it, is entirely desolate and despair- 
ing. 

But in her touching words: "One day 
I see a little crack come on it, and Jacob 
was coming to life again, and oh! I can't tell 
you how I felt when I saw him come out of 
his grave and fly around my room, nor how 
I cried right out loud as I see it: 'Why not 
my boy, too! Oh, Lord! you can do that 
just as well as this!' " 

To me the most charming feature of Mrs. 
Slosson's stories is the taste of "Flora and 
the country green" which flavors them all, 
and her loving familiarity with the secrets of 
New England woods, secrets of beauty and 
of balm. 

While the religious tendencies of New 
England seem in some cases inclined to 
dissolve in mists of speculation, and in others 
to crystallize into bowlders of dogma, we 
find in the stories of Rose Terry Cooke the 
happy expression of faith by works which 
marks the latest and most practical form of 
Christianity. 

92 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

Her recent death seems to hallow her 
name among those which we "speak softly 
as that of one whom God has taken," and 
gives a peculiar emphasis to those qualities 
in her work which make it worthy to "abide 
in the day when every man's shall be made 
manifest." 

One of the best of her stories, "The Dea- 
con's Week," has been published as a leaflet 
by the Boston Congregational Union, and 
I advise you all to "mark, learn, and 
inwardly digest" its practical teachings. 

Her characters are less idealized than 
those of Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins, 
their speech is homely to the verge of 
coarseness, and they make no secret of those 
small economies which the hard conditions 
of New England life make both necessary 
and honorable. 

One of these, Amanda Hart, when setting 
off for a rare journey, thus confides to 
a neighbor: "I don't care for no breakfast; 
I should have to bile the kettle, and have 
a cup and a plate to wash up, and like 
93 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

enough the dish cloth'd get mildewy if I left 
it damp ; I'll just take a dry bite in my clean 
handkerchief. I've eat up all my vittles 
but two cookies and a mite of cheese I've 
saved a puppus." 

But I must ask you to exchange the grave 
quiet of the shadow of New England elms 
for the noise and glare of the city in a glance 
at its more complex life as presented by 
those writers who have chosen it as the 
scene of their incidents. 

A superficial sameness characterizes many 
of them, for conventionality must always 
limit variety, but we find in each some of 
the peculiar features which distinguish its 
environment. 

In Boston alone could have been gathered 
the heterogeneous dinner-parties of Hale's 
"His Level Best," only in the course of 
a banquet in Philadelphia could arrive the 
solemn moment of "terrapin-tasting" de- 
scribed in Janvier's "In the St. Peter's Set," 
and nowhere else than in the city of New 
York could have been devised the porten- 
94 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

tous imposition of Mr. Henry Bishop's "A 
Little Dinner." 

That our own city has not been chosen as 
the background of any characteristic short 
story is perhaps due to the impression that 
any possible experience of its typical "Miss 
Breezy" would be better suited to point 
a moral than to adorn a tale. 

Knowing his New York as Sam Johnson 
did his London, Richard Harding Davis is 
facile princeps of the metropolitan school of 
minor fiction. 

Although he makes his native city of 
Philadelphia the scene of the adventure 
of his precocious and audacious Gallagher, 
the fame of this hero has been rivaled by 
that of his later creation, Van Bibber of 
New York. This Quixote of the club and 
the ballroom, always struggling between the 
narrowing traditions of his caste and the 
expanding impulses of a kindly heart, has 
for me a pronounced charm, and I love to 
follow his beneficent course as it leads him 
to sail in the swan-boat with these children 
95 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

of the slums, to make regular by his pres- 
ence the clandestine marriage planned by 
his reckless young friend, or to bring the 
recreant father of the waif of the green- 
room to acknowledge his child. 

This last story, "Her First Appearance," 
exhibits in a marked degree the one defect 
in Mr. Davis's otherwise delightful work, 
a tendency to improve the occasion, which 
sometimes takes the form of absolute and 
slightly tiresome preaching. 

He seems too a trifle ungrateful to those 
promoters of his marked social success, the 
society women of New York, in the por- 
traits he has given of them in several of his 
stories. Only in that of the heroine of "A 
Walk Up the Avenue," as she stands tremu- 
lous and tearful in that nook of Central 
Park, do we find an entirely pleasing one, 
and I count this story of the succeeding 
emotions of a single hour one of the most 
exquisitely finished of written pictures. 

In three stories whose incidents occur in 
the Casa Napoleon, a Spanish-American 
96 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

hotel in the lower part of the city of New 
York, Thomas Janvier paints the foreign 
element which marks its cosmopolitanism, 
while a lower scheme of color characterizes 
his picture of the stately interiors of Phila- 
delphia. 

The best of these are "The Uncle of an 
Angel," "In the St. Peter's Set," and "The 
Passing of Thomas," the accuracy of which 
is unimpaired by the covert humor of their 
treatment, while the recurring appearance of 
such typical characters as Mr. Hutchinson 
Post and the Pennington Browns gives to 
them something of the effect of a serial. 

We may well hesitate to exchange the 
terrapin and madeira of this exclusive circle 
for the mountain fare of our onward journey, 
but though we take the wings of a Pullman 
for our transit to other scenes, we are fol- 
lowed by the associations of the short story, 
for threads like those of Brander Matthews's 
"In the Vestibule Limited," Hale's "West- 
ern Ginevera," and Robert Meyers's "Fin 
de Siecle," with each passing mile. 
97 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

As we turn our faces toward the South, an 
overwhelming sense of its wide expanse 
comes upon us, and we stand bewildered by 
the number of the chronicles of its various 
physical and social characteristics. 

All the conditions of romance exist in 
this broad land — the antebellum life of the 
Virginia plantation, with its close relation 
between master and slave; the wild adven- 
tures of the moonshiners; the conflicting 
political sympathies of the border states, and 
the terrible upheaval of the social conditions 
caused by our Civil War, have all lent them- 
selves to heighten its possibilities, and been 
industriously used by the writers of short 
stories. 

Among these the chronicles of Virginia 
have the precedence of primogeniture, and 
Frances Courtney Bayler, in a story called 
"In the Old Dominion," gives us a taste of 
the meat on which her statesmen fed to 
grow so great in honor and in patriotism. 

It is contained in the catechism by which 
old Colonel Vesey supplements for his grand- 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

son that of the Church of England, and 
stands in this wise: "What are you, my son? 
A gentleman. What is a gentleman? What 
does he do? Fears God, loves his country, 
tells the truth, respects women, pities the 
unfortunate, helps the needy, and does his 
duty." Can we doubt that such teachings 
helped to gain for this single state the 
honor of having given birth to George 
Washington the sword, Thomas Jefferson 
the pen, and Patrick Henry the tongue of 
our Revolution? 

It has been said that the popular idea of 
the negro includes but the two extreme 
types, Uncle Tom and Jim Crow, but in the 
stories of Thomas Nelson Page we find many 
individuals who mark the steps of this gra- 
dation. 

To the slave of former days his master 
was the unit which gave value to him, 
the cipher, and in Page's "Edinboro's 
Drowndin' " we have a typical and amusing 
expression of his identification as made by a 
servant who attends his young master at a ball. 
99 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

"Fust thing I know," he says, "I seed 
a mighty likely colored gal a-standin' 
dyah, and I say, 'Lady, you look mighty 
sprightly to-night,' and she say she bleeged 
to be sprightly, her missus look so good. 
I axe her which one 'twas, and she say dat 
queen one over dyah. I tell her dere's 
a king one over dyah too what she got her 
cap set for, and she fly up and say her missus 
don't have to set her cap for nobody, and 
dey ain't studyin' about no up-country folks 
what nobody knows nothing about. Well, 
that audaciousness so aggravate me that 
I lit into dat niggah right dyah. I tell her 
that she ain't been nowhar if she don't know 
we-all; dat we was the best quality, de 
berry top of the pot; and den I tell her how 
great we was, how de kerridges was always 
hitched up night and day, and niggers just 
as thick as weeds, and how we use gold up 
there like other folks use wood. 

"Oh, I certainly 'stonish dat nigger, 
'cause I taken up for de family; and when 
I got through, she say, 'Massa George, he 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

berry good, sure enough, if 'twan't for his 
nigger,' but I ain't terrify myself none 'bout 
dat." 

To the credit of the negro race, we must 
allow that in many cases neither the knowl- 
edge of their freedom or the fallen fortunes 
of their masters availed to break the ties of 
a lifetime, and on the woolly heads of even 
such "ornery, no account" niggers as Joel 
Harris's Ananias, or James Lane Allen's 
King Solomon rest the halos of a noble and 
self-sacrificing devotion. The changed 
social conditions brought about by the Civil 
War have been touchingly shown by Mr. 
Allen in his "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky"; 
but it remained for a woman, Constance 
Fenimore Woolson, in her stories of "Rod- 
man the Keeper" and "Old Gurdiston," to 
paint the alternate anger and sorrow which 
swelled the hearts of our Southern sisters 
when they realized their terrible loss through 
the defeat of their cause. 

In another, under the name of "The 
South Devil," she gives us such a grewsome 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

picture of a Florida swamp, with the myriads 
of crawling insects and gliding snakes which 
lurk in its miasmatic shadows, that a chill 
creepiness comes over us as we read, and we 
consider the possible advantage of a few 
grains of quinine — or should we rather try 
a dose of the "mix" which Elizabeth Bel- 
lamy represents the landlady of Bent's Hotel 
as concocting for her guests by way of anti- 
dote to the malaria of Mississippi? 

"I like," says she, "a. little gin and a lit- 
tle assafetidy, and a little senny to begin 
with, and I adds snakeroot, and boneset, and 
dogwood, and wilier-bark, and sweet gum- 
balls, and red pepper, and sage a plenty, 
and then I fling in a little long sweetenin' 
(molasses). 

"Every one of them things is good, and 
when they're put in a mix, they're a power." 

The class to which Mrs. Bent belongs, 
the poor whites of the South, seems of all 
others the least likely to furnish an instance 
of womanly heroism and devotion, and yet 
I have for years cherished the example of 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

one of those gaunt, sallow, snuff-dipping sis- 
ters as distinctly worthy of my imitation. 

The story which records it bears the 
name of "The Elephant's Track," and its 
writer, Mrs. M. G. M. Davis, has laid its 
scene in a benighted region of the wide and 
unequally developed state of Texas. 

I venture to make a somewhat extended 
quotation from it, from the fact that I have 
never found it in any collection, and because 
it seems to me to combine in such an un- 
usual degree the requisites of vivid local 
color, definite character drawing, and marked 
originality of plot as to entitle it to stand 
very nearly at the head of our American 
short stories. 

Newt Pinson, on the arrival of a circus in 
his neighborhood, thus announces his wild 
design to give his wife and seven children 
the rare treat of a visit to its wonders: 

" 'It kin be done, Nance, and I'm goin' 

to do it, if it busts me. I've got just three 

dollars and a half left outen what Sam 

Leggett paid me for the yearlin'. But me 

103 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

and the children have been talkin' on it over, 
and they have conclusioned to throw in their 
aig money — Dan fo' bits, and Pete fo'; Joe 
and Jed has two bits betwix' 'em, and Polly 
Maria say as how she hev fifteen cents. 
I'm lacking of a dime, but I reckon as how 
I can scratch that up somehow.' 

" ' There's my two bits, up yan' in the 
clock,' said Mrs. Pinson; 'ye can take that if 
ye are such a plum fool as to pike the whole 
passel of us to town to see the circus.' " 

"Wise or foolish as we may deem it, they 
set off betimes on the day, creaking along 
in their rickety wagon, preceded or followed 
by the entire neighborhood. 

"The event of the journey was the coming 
upon and unloading to inspect the track of 
the circus elephant, deeply impressed in the 
soft mud of the wayside, a sight which 
stirred the hearts of the party with high 
hopes of the glories to come. 

"Short-lived anticipations, destined never 
to be realized! For on their arrival in town, 
Newt falls into the snare of an evil-doer, 
104 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

and comes back to his waiting family with 
this dismal confession. 

" 'We got to go back home 'thout seein' 
the show, that's all. I done lost away 
every cent of our circus money on a fool 
game of cards, that's all. Oh, Lord!' 

"A single wild wail burst from the chil- 
dren, a faint flush passed over Mrs. Pinson's 
thin face, and the light faded from her dark 
eyes. "Tain't no difference, Newt,' she 
said, lightly; 'jes' ye hitch up as quick as ye 
can, and let's get out of this here bigoty 
town. Me and the children are plumb beat 
out with these stuck-up town folks, anyhow.' 
Then to the children: 'Ef any one of ye 
says a word to your paw about this 'ere mis- 
fortune of his'n, or about hankerin' after the 
circus, and if every one of ye ain't that 
gamesome and lively as ef there want such 
a thing as a circus in this livin' world, I'll cow- 
hide ye s'well ye can't set down for a week.' 

"A curious hilarity prevailed that night 
around the campfire beside which they 
rested on their homeward way. 
105 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

' 'Mrs. Pinson, usually silent almost to taci- 
turnity, painted to her family in glowing 
colors the pride and wickedness of town 
folks; she pictured the wrath of Parson 
Skaggs when he should learn that members 
of his church had been inside a circus-tent; 
she related the fate of sundry sinners who 
had been overtaken by sudden death while 
laughing at the antics of a clown; she even 
lifted up her voice and sang some particu- 
larly flame-and-brimstone-promising hymn 
tunes. Even Newt was almost convinced 
that the five dollars had been well lost in 
keeping a perfessin' family out of a circus- 
tent; and when he slumbered at last, and 
his wife stretched herself beside him, she 
murmured, with a touch of triumph in her 
tone, 'Anyhow, I have seen the elephant's 
track!' Has any one of us ever reached 
a greater height of self-abnegation and 
wifely devotion?" 

To pass from such a scene to the pictur- 
esque and polyglot city of New Orleans, with 
the gay throng of its inhabitants darting 
1 06 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

about its verdurous streets like bright and 
chattering parroquets, is indeed a transi- 
tion. 

Nowhere do we find such a bewilderment 
of dialect as in the stories of its varied life 
presented to us by the industrious pen of 
George Cable, and among these I rank as 
specially striking that of Posson Jones. 

The contrast between the Creole Jules St. 
Ange, elegant little heathen, and the West 
Florida parson, his guileless though erring 
action, gives us a wonderful example of race 
distinction, and I know of no expression of 
a superficial religious liberality equal to the 
creed of the former as announced in these 
words: 

"What a man thing is right is right. It 
is all 'abit. Rilligion is a very strange. I 
know a man once he thing it is wrong to go 
to a cock-fight on Sunday evening. I thing 
it is all 'abit. I thing every man mus' have 
the rilligion he like the best. Me, I like 
the Catholique rilligion the best, for me it is 
the best. Every man will sure go to heaven 
107 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

if he like his rilligion the best. Even I 
thing some niggars will go." 

In contrast with such utterances as these, 
Posson Jones's lament over his unaccustomed 
sins of gambling and drunkenness swells like 
the deep tones of an organ after the sharp 
twanging of a mandolin, and we cannot 
wonder that Jules's first sight of a genuine 
repentance had power to move the shallow 
Creole heart to a new longing for a better 
life. 

Grace King's story of "Madriline, or The 
Feast of the Dead," is intense in the local 
color of its picture of the strange quarter of 
New Orleans where the mixed races swarm 
and wrangle, while the wild voodoo woman 
works her spell of horror over them all. 
A veritable inferno, as different from the 
South of the invalid and the tourist as a pic- 
ture by Dore from a landscape of Corot. 

The characteristics of the various South- 
ern pleasure and health resorts have been 
distinctly presented by Octave Thanet, and 
I know of nothing more adroitly done than 
108 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

her story called "Six Visions of St. Augus- 
tine," in which the conflicting impressions 
made by the old Spanish city are recorded 
in a half-dozen letters from as many tourists. 

It is a "far cry" from the orange groves 
of Florida to the prairies of the great West, 
and as the restrictions of Fortnightly cus- 
tom constrain me to make of my train of 
thought and illustration a "limited express," 
we must hasten on, with only a passing wave 
of recognition to Bret Harte and his Sierras, 
toward the main-traveled roads so lately 
peopled for us by the pen of Hamlin Garland. 

He himself says of these: "The main- 
traveled road in the West is mainly long and 
weariful, with a dull little town at one end 
and a home of toil at the other," and the 
figures whom he shows us as traversing it 
are chiefly workmen and stolid toilers of the 
heavy soil of the prairies of Iowa and Wis- 
consin. 

The inventions which have lessened for 
them the burdens of labor have taken from 
it something of its poetry and stimulus; 
109 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

a soulless machine has supplanted the freely 
swinging scythe, the nauseous smell of the 
fertilizer taints the reviving odor of the 
freshly turned earth, and the monotonous 
stretch of the prairie adds an element of 
depression to this daily toil. 

They are blind to the beauties of those 
green and yellow plains with a distance 
infinite as that of the sea, and deaf to the 
sound which Mr. Garland almost makes 
audible to us as in record of the whistle of 
gophers, the faint, wailing cry of the falling 
plover, the whir of the swift-winged prairie- 
pigeon, the quack of a lonely duck, or the 
honking of the wild geese sailing swiftly 
down the wind. 

No tree to wave, scarcely a sound of 
domestic life; only the faint sighing of the 
wind in the short grass or the voices of the 
wild things of the prairie. 

While many of the farmers of New Eng- 
land are pitifully narrowed and sharpened 
by their effort to wrest a livelihood from 
their few and rocky acres, these men and 
no 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

women of the prairies seem to grow revolt- 
ingly coarse and rough; their speech is vul- 
garized by an indigenous slang, and their 
lives appear to be almost destitute of beauty 
or sentiment. 

Almost, but not entirely, for that love rules 
the prairie farm as well as the court, the 
camp, and the grove is proved to us by this 
extract from the story called "The Return 
of a Private." An overworked and unassisted 
mother thus makes her moan: "Girls in 
love ain't no use the whole blessed week. 
Sunday mornin's they're looking down the 
road, expecting he'll come; Sunday after- 
noons they can't think of nothing else, 
'cause he's here. Monday mornin's they're 
sleepy and kind o' dreamy and slimpsy, and 
good for nothing on Tuesday and Wednes- 
day. Thursday they git absent-minded, and 
begin to look off toward Sunday again, and 
let the dishwater get cold under their noses; 
Friday they wash dishes, and go off in the 
best room and cry and look out of the win- 
dow; Saturdays they have queer spurts of 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

working like all possessed and spurts of 
frizzin' their hair; and Sunday they begin it 
all over again." 

The story from which these words are 
taken pictures the return of a private soldier 
from the comradeship and excitement of the 
camp and the battlefield to the dead level of 
such a life, and makes us realize that there 
may be sometimes as much heroism involved 
in the putting off a man's armor as there is 
in girding it on. 

The distinguishing characteristic of Mr. 
Garland's work is to me its pronounced 
virility, and I always fancy him as telling 
the story of his prairie-folk in a deep, bass 
voice, which is in marked contrast with the 
feminine treble which has rehearsed to us 
the chronicles of New England. 

Those who have read the recent tales of 
McLennan in the peculiar patois of the 
Habitans of Canada must have recognized 
a new departure in the record of the simple 
emotions of this primitive people, and from 
another borderland one of our townswomen 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

has contributed to the Cosmopolitan a story 
of the love and grief of a Mexican mother 
which is strong in the repressed power of 
its expression. 

Constance Fenimore Woolson, in her 
sketches of the French and half-breeds of 
our Lake Superior country, and of the Ger- 
man Separatist Community which still exists 
in the village of Zoar, shows us the effect of 
the introduction of a foreign element into our 
American life, and gives us another instance 
of the variety which I have claimed for it. 

"A small pigeon," says Spurgeon, "may 
carry a great message," and the senders 
forth of many short stories have bound 
beneath their slight wings the weight of their 
own criticisms and theories of life. 

The literary fads of the day have been 
widely satirized in "A Browning Courtship" 
and "Our Tolstoi Club," while Grace Denio 
Litchfield, in "An American Flirtation," 
shows the paralyzing effect on a group of 
British matrons of a sight of the freedom of 
our social intercourse. Margaret Deland, 
"3 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

in "A Fourth Class Appointment," preaches 
a whole sermon on civil service reform, and 
Sarah Jewett's "Decoration Day" rings out 
the solemn and stirring cadence of a funeral 
march. 

A New England Lear amusingly shows up 
the whimsies of the vegetarians, and I recom- 
mend any who feel themselves growing 
restive under the matrimonial yoke to read 
and lay to heart the "Fin de Siecle" of 
Robert Meyers. Bunner has supplemented 
the brief flashes of his "Short Sixes" by the 
steady light thrown on the problems of the 
labor question by the example of his Zadoc 
Pine, and has pointed a deeper moral in his 
"As One Having Authority." 

But it remained for Edward Stevenson, in 
his "Via Crucis," to touch our hearts and 
deepen our faith by his picture of the last 
stage of the painful road trodden by those 
blessed feet which centuries ago were 
"nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross." 

The story is told in a letter purporting to 
be written by Hilarius Gela, a young Roman, 
114 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

who after a night of losses at the gambling- 
table finds his homeward way obstructed by 
a cohort of soldiers, which, under the com- 
mand of his boon companion, Decius Lal- 
lius, is acting as guard to the condemned 
Nazarene on His road to Calvary. In the 
words of the letter: "The man could hardly 
stand. I saw that he stooped from exhaus- 
tion, but it was as if a god bent in compas- 
sion over the earth; and when one of the 
men who stood beside me flung a fragment 
of mortar at Him to make Him glance our 
way, and He did so, and looked, as I fan- 
cied, directly at me, why then what think 
you I either experienced, or imagined that 
I did? 

"It seemed, by the helmet of Mars! it 
seemed to me as if He demanded of me — 
of me, Hilarius Gela — 'Wherefore hast thou 
brought me to this hour? It is thyself that 
has done it!' And thereupon appeared it 
also to me that there began flashing before 
me my life - — yea, every hour of it since 
I came to know that I lived. 
"5 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

"And when the man's lids fell again over 
those eyes that so sought out me, Hilarius 
Gela, I swear unto you that I trembled and 
stood there with my jaw fallen. 

"Then, the worst part of the crowd having 
gone with the cohort and the prisoner, I went 
down to the street, and all the way went 
I laughing and marveling in spite of what 
I had felt for the instant at the Naza- 
rene's look, that any man should nowadays 
believe anything stoutly enough to die 
therefor. 

"Oh, folly indeed! For we come we 
know not whence, and we go into black 
darkness, and truth is nowhere, and the gods 
have become in our day mere shameful and 
silly fables." 

The manuscript here breaks off abruptly, 
but receives its key in the following note in 
another hand, reported to be appended to 
the single copy preserved in the Library of 
the Propaganda: "But at this time of perse- 
cution in Rome suffered Decius Lallius and 
Hilarius Gela. Now this Decius Lallius 
116 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

had formerly been a centurion who stood 
guard beside the cross, and Hilarius Gela 
was his friend, exceedingly zealous for the 
faith and abundant in good works." 

When this subject was placed upon our 
yearly, programme it lacked the limiting 
adjective which I have ventured to insert, 
for as I wrote, the conviction forced itself 
upon me that the time allotted was barely 
sufficient for the review of those of our own 
country. 

That these are abundant in quantity must 
certainly be acknowledged, and if we con- 
sider at some future time those of the vari- 
ous foreign writers, I do not fear the com- 
parison as to quality. 

And yet I feel the charm of Francois 
Coppee's delicate pictures of French life, 
and Guy de Maupassant's realistic portrayal 
of it; I recognize the artistic skill of Tour- 
guenieff, and I honor the moral purpose 
which elevates the slightest sketch of the 
master Tolstoi. 



117 



THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY 

And above all, I delight in the unique 
productions of Rudyard Kipling, that brilliant 
and erratic genius who, like a swift rocket, 
has lately flashed into our ken — but that's 
another story! 



118 



A MISSIONARY'S 
DIFFICULTIES 



mm 



The annual meeting of the Woman's Mis- 
sionary Society of the district was to be held 
in the city where I resided a few years since, 
and I was appointed as one of the committee 
which was to secure places of entertainment 
for the delegates. 

Our preliminary meetings had been so 
enthusiastic, and our anticipations of a good 
time so sanguine, that I accepted my share 
of the work with alacrity, and set off on 
willing feet, clogged with but one disturbing 
fear — that my supply of delegates would not 
be equal to the demand, and that I might 
not have enough of them to go around. 

I had not finished my first day's tramp, 
however, before all such fears had been 
given to the winds, and in the course of the 
119 



A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

second a story would constantly occur to my 
mind over which I have laughed when I saw 
only its ludicrous side, and while it still 
lacked the personal application which had 
sharpened its point for me from that time 
forward. 

The familiar saying, "He that will observe 
Providences will always have Providences to 
observe," holds good in other forms of ex- 
perience, and nothing is more certain than 
that those who can enjoy the ludicrous will 
find no lack of the ludicrous to enjoy. 

The experience of one of these laughter- 
loving souls it was which helped me through 
my weary round, and I remembered over and 
over again how she had enjoyed telling of 
the sending of her coachman to an intimate 
friend, with the announcement that if agree- 
able she would lunch with her on the fol- 
lowing day. Patrick's returning footsteps 
were long awaited, and when at last they 
were heard, were soon followed by the sight 
of his face beaming with satisfaction, and 
the triumphant words, "Well, ma'am, I've 



A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

got ye in at last, but I had to go to as much 
as a dozen places!" 

His first application having proven unsuc- 
cessful, he had been so loath to dash his 
mistress' hopes of a day out that he had 
kept persistently on to every door before 
which he had been wont to stop the wheels 
of her chariot till he had found one which 
opened cheerfully to receive her. 

"I've got you in at last!" would not have 
been an inappropriate form of announce- 
ment to my share of the delegates that 
places had been prepared for them; but a 
more encouraging one was adopted; and let 
us hope that no hint of the real state of the 
case ever transpired to chill the glow of their 
anticipation or remembrance. Of course 
this want of cordial response was by no 
means universal, and "Come in, thou blessed 
of the Lord!" might have served as the 
form of invitation to many hospitable Chris- 
tian homes, but a large proportion of those 
to whom I applied "began with one consent 
to make excuse." 



A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

If a visitation of cholera had been immi- 
nent, the necessity of an immediate and 
thorough renovation of dwellings would not 
have been more keenly felt, and Flora 
McFlimsey's destitution of clothes could 
not have been more deplorable than that 
which made it imperative for numbers of 
my Presbyterian friends to have in a dress- 
maker on the very days of the convention. 

Another story, too, would occasionally 
suggest itself to my mind, that one of 
Dickens's in which one partner hastens to 
lay the blame of his own parsimony to the 
niggardliness of the other member of the 
firm, for the same form of excuse was re- 
peated over by the members of the firm 
matrimonial. 

She "would be so happy to receive some 
of the delegates, but her husband disliked 
extremely to be annoyed by the presence of 
strangers at his table," and he would be 
transported to entertain a dozen or more, 
but his wife's nerves were quite unequal to 
the strain. 



A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

Of course it is "beautiful to see" hus- 
bands and wives agree in all domestic mat- 
ters, but did this mutual deference always 
prevent his bringing home an unexpected 
man to dinner, or her from urging her rela- 
tives to spend long weeks in their home? 

I am sure, however, that women are really 
more steadily and unselfishly hospitable 
than men. Most husbands are so sublimely 
ignorant of possible domestic complica- 
tions and so serenely confident of the ability 
of their wives to insure a succession of plen- 
tiful and well-served meals as unerring as 
that of stars in their courses, that their hos- 
pitality is but skin-deep compared to that 
which those wives are often ready to offer 
in full view of the fact that the best stocked 
cupboards will have their occasional seasons 
of bareness. 

Even our great exemplar of hospitality 
seems, from the Scripture record of his enter- 
tainment of the angels on that hot afternoon, 
to have confined his personal efforts to 
extending the invitation and catching the 
123 



- 



A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

calf; this accomplished, he appears to have 
confided the rest of the preparation to Sarah 
and her active helper, the young man, and 
to have gone back to converse with his 
friends till the meal was announced. And 
as we read of Sarah stooping patiently over 
that blazing hearth-fire for the baking of all 
the cakes which could be mixed from three 
measures of meal, may we not doubt whether 
we have ever done full justice to the virtues 
of the mother of the faithful? Have we not 
been wont to consider her a rather uncom- 
fortable person sometimes, and thought that 
the way in which Abraham walked with her 
from their first home, in the land of the 
Chaldees, to her last one, in the cave of 
Machpelah, must have been a thorny path 
for him? But even his banishment of 
Hagar, which has seemed to us the crowning 
ill deed of an unlovely life, may admit of 
some excuse if we take due notice of the 
statement that Abraham chose the day on 
which Isaac was weaned as that of a " great 
feast," and ask ourselves and each other 
124 



A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

whether that was a time which any woman 
would select as a good one to have company. 
Was it not really rather natural that in the 
desperation of such a crisis in her inexperi- 
enced, though late, maternity Sarah should 
be the least bit fractious and not quite so 
patient as usual with Ishmael's impish ways? 
But to return from these Eastern plains to 
the city streets, where even the fresh breeze 
of spring failed to lift from my heart its 
weight of discouraged solicitude, and ask 
the more practical question which haunted 
me during those weary days, "What has 
become of that which Longfellow calls free- 
hearted hospitality?" Has it fallen in the 
street, and will it never arise to bless and 
sanctify the homes which in its absence no 
modern arts of decoration will ever render 
truly beautiful? 

That it once existed I know well, for my 
youth was passed in a home whose doors, 
like the "happy gates of gospel grace," 
stood "open night and day" to pilgrims 
from whom the only passport demanded was 
125 



A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

an assurance that they were "to Zion 
bound." 

Colporteurs had as certain a place by the 
fireside as the coal-scuttle; and yet the hos- 
pitality of those days was practiced at more 
expense of personal effort than is required 
of us in these later times of skilled and 
easily purchased service. Life was simpler 
then, to be sure, and hosts were less ambi- 
tious, and guests less exacting; but was not 
the simple fare and hearty welcome of those 
days far more in harmony with the hand- 
to-hand giving of a cup of cold water in the 
name of a disciple, so earnestly commended 
by our Lord, than the more elaborate enter- 
tainment of these times? 

The commercial spirit of the age, too, 
seems to have introduced itself into this 
department of our daily life, and one hears 
so much of social indebtedness that many 
of these modern entertainments might well 
be called "meetings of the creditors." But 
is not the careful calculation of debit and 
credit in such matters an outgrowth of the 
126 



A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

tendency which our Lord expressly de- 
nounced, the cold and selfish desire to 
receive as much again for any effort and 
expenditure in the direction of hospitality? 
It is so difficult for us to realize that Christ's 
words, "When thou makest a feast," will 
bear translation, "When thou givest a recep- 
tion," and so easy for us to feel that the 
cordial and uncalculating hospitality which 
he enjoined would never do in the times of 
high living and low thinking to which we 
have fallen. And is there not danger that 
the recent revival of the esthetic idea, with 
its exactions in the way of household deco- 
ration, may tend to make our homes less 
easy and natural places, and to put their 
mistresses in an anxious and nervous super- 
vision which must prevent the warmth of 
cordial welcome from accompanying the 
glow of the wood-fires which we have has- 
tened to relight on resurrected andirons? 

As I read a few days since the story of 
the Shunemite woman's grateful impulse 
toward the man of God, and the simple fur- 
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A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

nishing of that chamber over the wall which 
was its result, I could not help wondering 
whether a "great woman" of the present 
day would be contented with so inexpensive 
a manifestation of her thankfulness. The 
bed, the table, the stool, and the candlestick 
would doubtless each have its place, but 
would not the bed be draped and ruffled and 
shammed till the dusty and way-worn 
prophet would hesitate "to turn in thither," 
the table and the stool each wear its square 
of slippery and much embroidered linen, the 
candlestick bear a useless and decorated 
wax-light, and the very wall break with a 
parti-colored arrangement of Japanese fans? 

A great opportunity for the woman, no 
doubt, to display her artistic tendencies, but 
very likely to take all the ease and freedom 
from the sojourn of her guest, and to make 
his future visits few and his stays short. 

Dainty table-furnishings and choice bits 

of ware are certainly fair to see and pleasant 

to possess, but they too add an element of 

anxiety to our modern housekeeping, and 

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A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

are perhaps the last straw which makes some 
of us dwellers in this city of the plain ready 
to echo that wailing preface of the ancient 
prophets, "The burden of Tyre! the burden 
of Nineveh!" The fact that this burden is 
largely self-imposed takes no whit from its 
weight, but should make us pause and 
thoughtfully inquire whether we are not in 
some degree allowing it to hinder our feet 
from running in the straight path made for 
them by such simple injunctions as "Pray 
without ceasing, use hospitality without 
grudging, and be not forgetful to entertain 
strangers." 

But how much easier obedience to this 
command would have seemed if the apostle 
had qualified it a little, and written, "Be not 
forgetful to entertain agreeable or distin- 
guished strangers." There it stands, how- 
ever, simply strangers, and we are to "take 
them for better or for worse," and face the 
possibility of being bored, which seemed to 
me one of the most threatening lions in my 
way to find places for my delegates. 
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A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

Of course, I know that this grace of hos- 
pitality is one of nature's good gifts, and 
that some happy souls spring easily to its 
exercise, while to others the reception of 
a guest is a solemn affair, and, like matri- 
mony, "not to be entered into unadvisedly 
or lightly"; but does not some of our dread 
of a prolonged visit arise from a conscious- 
ness of a want of simplicity and Godly sin- 
cerity in our daily living? 

To entertain an angel would be embarrass- 
ing in a home where style is held to be of 
more consequence than godliness, and the 
shams and wordly ambitions of some house- 
holds would "shrivel like a parched scroll" 
before the gaze of burning scorn which must 
fall on them from the clear-seeing eyes of 
a heavenly visitor. The arrival of such 
a guest seems, however, far removed from 
the possibilities of these latter days, and 
I must own that their visits have come to 
be few and far between; but that they do 
sometimes seem to alight at our doors even 
now, I have conclusive evidence in a well- 
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A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

remembered experience of my youth. This 
alighting, though, was not heralded by the 
swift flashing of snowy wings, but less start- 
ingly accomplished by the stepping of an 
elderly country parson and his wife from 
a rather shabby one-horse wagon at our gate. 
For the silver trumpet had called to a holy 
convocation of the saints of the vicinity, and 
these had heard and answered, and were 
billeted on us for the period of their stay. 
Billeted on us! Rather let me say that they 
honored us by their presence, for their soci- 
ety was a benediction, and the day of their 
departure one of deep regret to every mem- 
ber of the household. Years passed with 
only occasional news of them, until the 
meeting of the American Board in our city 
brought one of this pair again to our door. 
It was the wife, who came alone in her 
garb of widowhood, for her husband had 
ended his life of long and patient invalidism 
a year or two before. In the solemn days 
when the last things were in full view and 
the last words were being calmly said, he 
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A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

had charged her if this meeting were ever 
held in that vicinity, to attend it, if possible. 
In the days of struggling povery which fol- 
lowed, her own desire to do so might have 
failed, but she had hidden his words in her 
heart, and as the time drew near, toiled 
early and late to procure the means for the 
short journey. But the farmers' wives for 
whom she nursed and sewed were slow in 
payment, and on the day before that on 
which she had hoped to set off she said to 
her children, "I must give it up, but father 
knows I tried to go." But who should doubt 
the loving care of the widow's God when 
I tell you that that very evening's mail 
brought a letter from a former classmate of 
her husband's, a poor and struggling min- 
ister, who from his own deep poverty had 
sent to her, with many cheery words of 
Christian sympathy, a sum sufficient, for the 
expenses of her journey? 

So you see she could go after all, and the 
children helped her off, and she had a beau- 
tiful time, and came home with a new bap- 
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A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

tism of zeal for foreign missions, some drops 
of which we wilL hope sprinkled the dry 
hearts of the farmers' wives who had come 
so near to keeping her at home. 

If I have seemed to dwell unduly upon 
these lesser kindnesses of hospitality, it is 
because I hesitate to approach what seems 
to me to be the deeply underlying cause of 
our failures in its exercise, and that which 
causes its flame to burn in fitful flashes of 
occasional impulse rather than with the 
steady and cheering glow of Christian prin- 
ciple, for "what am I or what is my house" 
that I should reproach my sisters with the 
lack of entire consecration which prevents 
us from holding our homes, not as our own, 
not to be used for purposes of selfish enjoy- 
ment or ostentatious display, but as kept for 
the Master's use in the persons of those of 
His children who need to share in their 
cheer and comfort. 

Some of us can spread before them tables 
loaded with dainty fare; others can offer lit- 
tle more than a cup of cold water; but at 
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A MISSIONARY'S DIFFICULTIES 

each repast may sit unseen the Heavenly- 
Guest, whose presence can change the pure 
water of Christian hospitality into the bread 
and glowing wine of heavenly benediction. 

" Lord Christ in mercy bring, 

Our selfish ways to shame, 
And make our hidden lives shine out 

With holier thought and aim, 
That one and all who see their light 

May glorify Thy name. 

11 Free as Thy love to us, 

Our fellow-love should be, 
Spread like an ever-plenteous feast, 

And spread as if for Thee, 
Since Thou of all our deeds hast said, 

1 Ye do them unto Me.' " 



i34 



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